OpenAI Poaches 3 Top Engineers From DeepMind

OpenAI announced today it has hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from rival Google DeepMind, all of whom will work in a newly opened OpenAI office in Zurich, Switzerland. OpenAI executives told staff in an internal memo on Tuesday that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai will be joining the company to work on multimodal AI, artificial intelligence models capable of performing tasks in different mediums ranging from images to audio. OpenAI has long been at the forefront of multimodal AI and released the first version of its text-to-image platform Dall-E in 2021. Its flagship chatbot ChatGPT, however, was initially only capable of interacting with text inputs. The company later added voice and image features as multimodal functionality became an increasingly important part of its product line and AI research.