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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteMeta hired three researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich office in June 2025: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai. OpenAI confirmed they had left, and contemporaneous reports said they were joining Meta’s superintelligence effort. The move was a notable recruiting win, but it was not an acquisition of OpenAI’s Zurich office—and the researchers’ individual compensation has not been disclosed.
What happened in June 2025
Reports on June 25–26 said Meta had recruited Beyer, Kolesnikov and Zhai from OpenAI’s Zurich office. Reuters, summarizing a Wall Street Journal report, said OpenAI confirmed the three had left and that Meta’s destination for them was its superintelligence effort. Reuters’ report and TechCrunch’s contemporaneous coverage placed the hires in a broader recruiting push.
“Poached” is common shorthand for recruiting from a competitor; the documented event is three hires. There is no reported evidence here of a legal dispute or of Meta acquiring the Zurich office.
Who are the researchers?
Lucas Beyer
Beyer works in computer vision and machine learning. He co-authored the 2021 paper “An Image is Worth 16×16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale,” a prominent work on vision transformers: a way to adapt transformer architectures to image data.
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Alexander Kolesnikov
Kolesnikov has collaborated with Beyer and Zhai on visual representation learning and vision models. His publication record includes research on self-supervised visual representations and vision-transformer training, including work on self-supervised learning and work on training vision transformers.
Xiaohua Zhai
Zhai’s public professional profile lists roles at Google DeepMind and OpenAI Zurich, along with work involving WebLI, SigLIP, PaliGemma, data balancing and multimodal research. Multimodal systems process or learn from more than one kind of input, such as text and images.
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Why hiring them as a group mattered
The three had worked together at Google DeepMind before moving to OpenAI, and reporting described them as part of the team that helped establish OpenAI’s Zurich operation. Their shared experience spans large-scale visual and multimodal research. Hiring colleagues with an established record of collaboration can give a lab a ready-made working relationship as well as individual expertise; that is a reasonable interpretation of the group move, not a publicly quantified claim from Meta.
Their fields are relevant to frontier AI because modern systems increasingly combine text with images, audio, video and other inputs. That relevance does not establish that Meta assigned them to a particular unreleased model or product.
What Meta meant by its superintelligence push
At the time of the hires, “superintelligence” was a strategic label for Meta’s high-end AI effort, not a precise technical milestone. Meta later framed its ambition as bringing “personal superintelligence” to people through consumer products and context-aware devices. Its superintelligence page and July 2025 announcement describe that broad vision, including connections to devices such as glasses. They do not show that these three researchers were specifically hired to build a glasses feature.
What is known about the $100 million figure
The compensation claims were separate from the confirmed hiring. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had made offers to some OpenAI employees involving sums at or above $100 million. That figure was widely discussed as a compensation-package claim, not verified pay for Beyer, Kolesnikov and Zhai. Beyer later said he had not received a $100 million signing bonus, as Fortune reported. The trio’s exact compensation terms have not been publicly disclosed.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the move says about the AI talent market
The hires came amid intense competition among Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and other AI organizations for experienced researchers and engineers. Meta was also recruiting prominent figures elsewhere in the industry; the Reuters account noted its recruitment of Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. For companies pursuing frontier models, talent joins computing resources and research infrastructure as a strategic asset. A team that already knows how to work together may be particularly attractive, though the public reporting does not quantify the value of this specific hire.
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What the hires do—and do not—prove
- They show: Meta was willing to recruit an experienced, collaborative group to strengthen its frontier-AI effort, while OpenAI lost three researchers from a relatively new Zurich operation.
- They do not show: that the researchers were OpenAI’s most important staff, that their departure damaged a particular model or product, or that Meta had surpassed OpenAI technically.
- They do not establish: that each researcher received $100 million, that the group was assigned to a named project, or that its arrival determined the success of Meta’s strategy.
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