Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung, key researchers behind OpenAI’s o1 and o3 models, are now joining Meta.
The duo previously worked together at Google and share a long-standing research partnership.
Meta’s AI hiring spree comes amid OpenAI’s own counter-efforts to recruit talent from rivals like Tesla, xAI, and Meta.
Meta has been aggressively recruiting talent to create its dream AI team. Recently, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the company have made headlines for allegedly poaching talent from Open AI and other tech companies. According to Wired, the company has already hired a few high-profile researchers from ChatGPT and has now poached two more prominent researchers from OpenAI, Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung. The company wants them to join its superintelligence lab, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter.
SurveyBoth researchers have contributed to OpenAI’s in-depth research projects, which include the development of the fundamental o1 and o3 models. In 2023, Wei, a former Google researcher renowned for his contributions to reinforcement learning (RL) and chain-of-thought prompting, joined OpenAI. He referred to himself as a “diehard” for RL at OpenAI.
However, Hyung Won Chung, who focused on agents and reasoning at OpenAI, also overlapped with Wei at Google. He has a long-standing professional relationship with Wei and contributed to the company’s core research models, according to his personal website. Since then, the researchers have not made any public statements about the move, and neither OpenAI nor Meta have deactivated their OpenAI Slack profiles.
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Wired also revealed last month that Mark Zuckerberg, sent out an internal memo detailing a revised AI strategy, along with a list of new hires for the company’s prestigious AI division. The majority of those names were stolen from OpenAI.
OpenAI has responded by going on a counterhiring rampage, hiring engineers from xAI, Tesla, and even Meta. As businesses look to create advanced general intelligence (AGI) systems, the back-and-forth reveals a growing talent arms race in the AI space.
In a recent social media post, Wei discussed his experience with reinforcement learning, drawing parallels between AI training and personal development. “Imitation is good and you have to do it at first,” he wrote. “But beating the teacher requires walking your own path and taking risks and rewards from the environment,” he added.
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Ashish Singh
Ashish Singh is the Chief Copy Editor at Digit. He's been wrangling tech jargon since 2020 (Times Internet, Jagran English '22). When not policing commas, he's likely fueling his gadget habit with coffee, strategising his next virtual race, or plotting a road trip to test the latest in-car tech. He speaks fluent Geek. View Full Profile
