Meta has successfully recruited three OpenAI researchers—including the founders of its Zurich office—as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive campaign to poach top AI talent with lavish offers and personal outreach, signaling a major escalation in the battle for frontier AI leadership. (Source: Image by RR)

Zuckerberg Reportedly Sends Personal WhatsApp Messages to Targeted Scientists

Meta has scored a high-profile win in the ongoing battle for elite AI talent, reportedly hiring three prominent researchers away from OpenAI. According to The Wall Street Journal, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai—who collectively established OpenAI’s Zurich office—have joined Meta’s superintelligence team. The move, as noted in techcrunch.com, marks a notable victory for Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive talent acquisition strategy, which has included multimillion-dollar offers and personal outreach to top researchers.

The recruiting spree, dubbed the “Recruiting Party” by insiders, involves Zuckerberg personally messaging candidates via WhatsApp, targeting top-tier AI scientists, and hosting intimate dinners at his Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe residences. As first revealed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a podcast with his brother, some offers from Meta have reportedly topped $100 million in total compensation. While Altman publicly dismissed the effectiveness of Zuckerberg’s charm offensive, these latest defections suggest the strategy is beginning to bear fruit.

Still, the campaign has had mixed success. While Zuckerberg recently secured a $14 billion investment deal to bring in Scale AI’s founder Alexandr Wang—one of the most expensive hires in tech history—he has failed to lure some of OpenAI’s biggest names, including co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman. Both have since left to launch independent ventures. Altman previously expressed satisfaction that Meta had yet to attract OpenAI’s “best people,” a claim now complicated by the departure of three key researchers.

This latest development underscores the intensifying competition between tech giants to dominate the next era of AI development. With frontier AI talent in limited supply and sky-high valuations, recruitment has become a high-stakes, high-dollar battlefield. Meta’s ability to pull experienced researchers from a rival like OpenAI signals that compensation and leadership vision—along with personal outreach from the CEO—are becoming increasingly decisive factors in shaping the future of AI teams.

read more at techcrunch.com