How Impactful Are the OpenAI Researchers Poached by Meta? And Why Does OpenAI Use TPUs?

We will be rolling out our advertising research memos throughout this week, along with real-time updates on our perspectives regarding the advertising industry. During last week's research, I came across many exciting AI-powered advertising use cases.

This week has been a whirlwind of explosive AI news, but two stories stand out as potential game-changers for the industry's competitive landscape:

Meta Lures Four Core Researchers from OpenAI

Just days after Sam Altman boasted on a podcast that Meta's $100M recruitment push for OpenAI's top talent had failed ("OpenAI people won't leave"), the tables have turned dramatically. Our research confirms nearly every core OpenAI researcher received massive offers from Meta. While many hesitated last week, the tide has now shifted:

• First, Meta gutted OpenAI's Zurich office, snapping up the "ViT Trio" (vision transformer pioneers).

• This weekend brought even bigger news— Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi and Hongyu Ren joined Meta en masse. Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang even popped champagne on X. Their defection could reshape AI's competitive dynamics.

Public records show these researchers aren’t just world-class—they were research leads with far greater influence than Zurich’s ViT team: