Meta's interest in Ilya Sutskever, formerly of the $32 billion AI startup, underscores the competitive AI landscape. Initially seeking to acquire his company to bolster its AI capabilities, Meta now aims to hire Sutskever directly, recognizing his expertise and leadership in deep learning and neural networks.OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed to TechCrunch that Bansal had departed OpenAI. Bansal’s LinkedIn page says that he left OpenAI in June.
Bansal has worked at OpenAI since 2022 and was a key player in kickstarting the company’s work on reinforcement learning alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever. He is listed as a foundational contributor on OpenAI’s first AI reasoning model, o1.
A Meta spokesperson said the company “will share more about our superintelligence effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.”
Zuckerberg’s aggressive hiring tactics escalate an AI talent war that’s reached new heights of late. Meta, Google and OpenAI, along with a host of other big companies and high-valued startups, are racing to develop the most powerful large language models, and pushing toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that’s considered equal to or greater than human intelligence.
Last week, Meta agreed to pump $14.3 billion into Scale AI to bring on Wang and a few other top engineers while getting a 49% stake in the startup.
Meta’s AI superintelligence lab could become a key internal group that powers products throughout the company, much like Google’s DeepMind unit. Meta has an ambitious effort to build AI agents for business under the former Salesforce CEO of AI, Clara Shih. In order to build competitive agents, Meta needs to develop frontier AI reasoning models to power them.
The decision to recruit Sutskever underscores a broader trend wherein established tech corporations are increasingly valuing talent over mere acquisitions. By bringing in prominent figures from successful startups, companies like Meta aim to foster innovation from within rather than solely relying on external technologies . This strategy not only helps retain top-tier talent but also enhances the overall intellectual capital of the organization.
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