In the same week Meta poached key OpenAI researchers, reports surfaced of a one-week internal shutdown at OpenAI, what’s cooking? Meta’s talent raid disrupts OpenAI’s superintelligence ambitions On Jun. 30, OpenAI reportedly entered what several sources have described as a…In the same week Meta poached key OpenAI researchers, reports surfaced of a one-week internal shutdown at OpenAI, what’s cooking? Meta’s talent raid disrupts OpenAI’s superintelligence ambitions On Jun. 30, OpenAI reportedly entered what several sources have described as a…

Inside OpenAI’s reported one-week shutdown — what’s really going on?

In the same week Meta poached key OpenAI researchers, reports surfaced of a one-week internal shutdown at OpenAI, what’s cooking?

Table of Contents

  • Meta’s talent raid disrupts OpenAI’s superintelligence ambitions
  • Targeting talent for the Meta superintelligence team
  • OpenAI vs Meta model strategy divergence
  • OpenAI and Meta build opposing infrastructure playbooks

Meta’s talent raid disrupts OpenAI’s superintelligence ambitions

On Jun. 30, OpenAI reportedly entered what several sources have described as a week-long, company-wide shutdown, to help employees recover from unsustainable work hours and mounting internal pressure. 

The company has not officially confirmed the pause, but internal communications suggest it came amid rising anxiety over Meta’s recruitment of top artificial intelligence talent.

Days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired four senior OpenAI researchers to join its superintelligence lab, OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen sent a blunt memo to staff. 

“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote in a Slack message obtained by WIRED.

The memo outlined how Chen, CEO Sam Altman, and other executives were actively working to counter ongoing departures. 

“We’ve been more proactive than ever before,” Chen said, describing efforts to recalibrate compensation and find new ways to retain top researchers. “We’re working around the clock to talk to those with offers.”

While calling Meta’s approach “deeply disruptive,” Chen stressed that OpenAI’s response would be grounded in internal fairness. “I’ll fight to keep every one of you,” he wrote, “but I won’t do so at the price of fairness to others.”

Targeting talent for the Meta superintelligence team

Meta’s recruitment activity intensified throughout June, shifting from standard outreach to a direct and coordinated effort involving CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself.

According to The New York Times on Jun. 28, the approach included emails, WhatsApp messages, and personal dinner invitations at Zuckerberg’s homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. 

The effort was organized through an internal Meta chat group titled “Recruiting Party” and focused specifically on OpenAI researchers working on advanced models. 

In addition to OpenAI, Meta has also hired several AI researchers from Anthropic and Google, further expanding its new superintelligence division.

The effect on OpenAI was immediate. Eight researchers have departed to join Meta’s new AI superintelligence division. Trapit Bansal, a key figure in reinforcement learning and the o1 reasoning model, was among the first to leave, as confirmed by TechCrunch on Jun. 26.

Others followed shortly after. Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, who had helped build OpenAI’s Zurich office, also joined Meta, according to a Jun. 25 report from The Wall Street Journal. 

Four more researchers — Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren — later left as well. Yu and Bi had contributed to GPT-4o and o4-mini, two of OpenAI’s most recent models. Their exits were verified through deactivated Slack profiles.

The string of departures has prompted growing concern within OpenAI’s leadership. In an interview on the Uncapped podcast on Jun. 17, CEO Sam Altman claimed that Meta was offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million. 

That figure was later challenged by Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth, who told WIRED on Jun. 30 that the compensation was structured differently and included multiple components.

Internally, OpenAI warned staff that Meta could take advantage of the company’s break period to escalate its outreach. 

In a memo shared by Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, employees were advised to remain cautious and avoid being influenced by what were described as rushed or inflated offers.

In response, OpenAI has begun reassessing compensation packages and exploring new strategies to retain key talent as competition for AI researchers continues to accelerate.

OpenAI vs Meta model strategy divergence

As of July 2025, OpenAI and Meta are moving in distinctly different directions in how they approach AI development. 

OpenAI continues to build closed-source, proprietary models designed for controlled deployment and premium pricing. Its current model suite includes ChatGPT, GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, o3, and o4-mini. 

While these models perform competitively in benchmark testing, they are only available through APIs and come at a steep cost to developers. 

GPT-4.5, which launched in February, has shown performance gains over GPT-4o but drew widespread criticism for its pricing, reaching up to $150 per million output tokens. 

In comparison, GPT-4o costs $10, and o3 is priced at $40 per million tokens. Despite their strength in reasoning tasks, the costs have created friction for developers seeking scalable access.

OpenAI has indicated interest in broadening accessibility, having announced the release of an open reasoning model later in the year. The plan was first hinted at through a feedback form shared on the company’s website in April.

Meta, on the other hand, has built its AI ecosystem around an open-source foundation. The Llama model family has become central to this approach, particularly the Llama 3.1 405B model, which has surpassed one billion downloads. 

Meta’s leadership has described it as the first open-source model to operate at the frontier level, offering broad accessibility and community involvement. 

However, the subsequent release of Llama 4 in April received a more muted response. Its performance fell behind newer models from Google, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, which have advanced in both reasoning capabilities and multimodal integration.

A key challenge for Meta has been the lack of a strong AI reasoning model. Unlike OpenAI’s o3 or DeepSeek’s R1, Meta has not yet delivered a comparable system in this space. 

To address this, Meta has focused on strengthening its internal talent pool. The addition of researchers from OpenAI, including Bansal and the Zurich team, is seen as a step toward building its own frontier reasoning capabilities. 

Bansal’s experience in reinforcement learning is expected to play a role in shaping Meta’s next-generation models, while others bring expertise in multimodal systems that could improve voice and agent-based AI products.

OpenAI and Meta build opposing infrastructure playbooks

Throughout 2025, OpenAI and Meta have expanded their AI ambitions through large-scale investments and strategic partnerships, each revealing a distinct approach to shaping the future of AI.

On Jun. 13, Meta announced a $14.3 billion investment to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI, a prominent data-labeling firm critical to model training. 

As part of the deal, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang joined Meta to lead its superintelligence lab. Although Meta did not receive voting rights in the company, the move sparked friction across the industry.

Several clients of Scale AI, including OpenAI, Google, and xAI, responded by pausing or ending their contracts. Concerns emerged over the potential risk of Meta gaining indirect access to proprietary training data through its new position. 

Reports suggest that OpenAI had already begun diversifying its data supply before the acquisition, turning to more specialized providers such as Mercor.

At the same time, Meta has been expanding its infrastructure. It is currently developing a major data center in Louisiana, a facility reportedly twice the size of OpenAI’s planned site in Texas. The project is expected to support Meta’s growing compute needs as its research programs scale.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is investing $60 billion into a dedicated data center in Abilene, Texas, in collaboration with Oracle and SoftBank. This site plays a central role in OpenAI’s broader effort to secure long-term computational advantages. 

Beyond domestic operations, the company has also pursued international partnerships, including advanced discussions with Reliance Industries in India.

The talks have centered on deploying ChatGPT across Indian markets and potentially hosting models locally within a planned 3-gigawatt data center in Gujarat. 

As part of the proposed arrangement, OpenAI has offered to reduce subscription costs for ChatGPT in India and provide model access to Reliance’s enterprise customers.

While funding continues to pour into the AI sector at record pace, OpenAI and Meta are channeling it in fundamentally different directions. In the end, the winner may not be the company with the best model, but the one whose systems others decide to build on.

Piyasa Fırsatı
Talent Protocol Logosu
Talent Protocol Fiyatı(TALENT)
$0,002425
$0,002425$0,002425
+0,37%
USD
Talent Protocol (TALENT) Canlı Fiyat Grafiği
Sorumluluk Reddi: Bu sitede yeniden yayınlanan makaleler, halka açık platformlardan alınmıştır ve yalnızca bilgilendirme amaçlıdır. MEXC'nin görüşlerini yansıtmayabilir. Tüm hakları telif sahiplerine aittir. Herhangi bir içeriğin üçüncü taraf haklarını ihlal ettiğini düşünüyorsanız, kaldırılması için lütfen [email protected] ile iletişime geçin. MEXC, içeriğin doğruluğu, eksiksizliği veya güncelliği konusunda hiçbir garanti vermez ve sağlanan bilgilere dayalı olarak alınan herhangi bir eylemden sorumlu değildir. İçerik, finansal, yasal veya diğer profesyonel tavsiye niteliğinde değildir ve MEXC tarafından bir tavsiye veya onay olarak değerlendirilmemelidir.

Ayrıca Şunları da Beğenebilirsiniz

Crypto News: Donald Trump-Aligned Fed Governor To Speed Up Fed Rate Cuts?

Crypto News: Donald Trump-Aligned Fed Governor To Speed Up Fed Rate Cuts?

The post Crypto News: Donald Trump-Aligned Fed Governor To Speed Up Fed Rate Cuts? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. In recent crypto news, Stephen Miran swore in as the latest Federal Reserve governor on September 16, 2025, slipping into the board’s last open spot right before the Federal Open Market Committee kicks off its two-day rate discussion. Traders are betting heavily on a 25-basis-point trim, which would bring the federal funds rate down to 4.00%-4.25%, based on CME FedWatch Tool figures from September 15, 2025. Miran, who’s been Trump’s top economic advisor and a supporter of his trade ideas, joins a seven-member board where just three governors come from Democratic picks, according to the Fed’s records updated that same day. Crypto News: Miran’s Background and Quick Path to Confirmation The Senate greenlit Miran on September 15, 2025, with a tight 48-47 vote, following his nomination on September 2, 2025, as per a recent crypto news update. His stint runs only until January 31, 2026, stepping in for Adriana D. Kugler, who stepped down in August 2025 for reasons not made public. Miran earned his economics Ph.D. from Harvard and worked at the Treasury back in Trump’s first go-around. Afterward, he moved to Hudson Bay Capital Management as an economist, then looped back to the White House in December 2024 to head the Council of Economic Advisers. There, he helped craft Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” approach, aimed at fixing trade gaps with China and the EU. He wouldn’t quit his White House gig, which irked Senator Elizabeth Warren at the September 7, 2025, confirmation hearings. That limited time frame means Miran gets to cast a vote straight away at the FOMC session starting September 16, 2025. The full board now features Chair Jerome H. Powell (Trump pick, term ends 2026), Vice Chair Philip N. Jefferson (Biden, to 2036), and folks like Lisa D. Cook (Biden, to 2028) and Michael S. Barr…
Paylaş
BitcoinEthereumNews2025/09/18 03:14
Kodiak Sciences Announces Pricing of Upsized Public Offering of Common Stock

Kodiak Sciences Announces Pricing of Upsized Public Offering of Common Stock

PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Kodiak Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: KOD), a precommercial retina focused biotechnology company committed to researching
Paylaş
AI Journal2025/12/17 12:15
Oil jumps over 1% on Venezuela oil blockade

Oil jumps over 1% on Venezuela oil blockade

Oil prices rose more than 1 percent on Wednesday after US President Donald Trump ordered “a total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering
Paylaş
Agbi2025/12/17 11:55