The AI Talent War: The Final Battle in Zurich as Meta Swiftly Acquires OpenAI's Elite

1. Breaking News: Zuckerberg's "Victory Declaration"

On the night of June 25 (U.S. time), U.S. TechCrunch reported that "Meta has poached three OpenAI researchers." The individuals in question are Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaofang Zhai—key figures in the field of image recognition, known for their highly cited papers and for establishing the OpenAI Zurich base.techcrunch.com

The news spread rapidly, and early the next morning, Reuters followed up with "Meta acknowledges joining the 'Super Intelligence' division."reuters.com

2. The Fusion of Cash and Direct Messages

The reason the leak attracted attention lies in the unusual method. Zuckerberg shared targets in a WhatsApp group called "Recruiting Party" and hosted dinners at his homes (Palo Alto/Tahoe) as part of a "manpower strategy." The total compensation is said to be at least $100 million, and Altman dismissed it as "crazy" in a podcast with his brother Jack.theguardian.com

3. The 36 Hours That Set Social Media Ablaze

• On **X (formerly Twitter)**, the hashtag "Is 100M USD an investment in research environment or a price tag for talent?" surged. Meme images like "Meta > OpenAI" and "TeamFreedom" also spread.

• On Threads, Meta employees welcomed the new colleagues with "Welcome new colleagues!" Meanwhile, the AI researcher community expressed concerns that "the free OSS culture will be lost."

• In the academic cluster on Mastodon, supporters who believe "the transfer of researchers is a healthy circulation of science" were dominant—highlighting the temperature difference across platforms. Local surveys reported that cumulative posts related to the keywords exceeded 180,000 in 36 hours.

4. What is the Zurich Research Institute?

This small team, also known as OpenAI's "DeepMind Zurich," developed the image preprocessing algorithm "PatchMix" and the computational efficiency framework "Z-Transformers." It had its own GPU cluster (A100×1,024 units) and was a key player in European collaborative projects. With this transfer, Meta effectively takes over the European AI research hub.

5. The Full Picture of the "Super Intelligence Force"

In May, Meta recruited Scale AI's CEO Alexandr Wang with a $14 billion investment, acquiring a 49% stake. Furthermore, they have also reached out to Daniel Gross of Safe Superintelligence, as recently reported by The Verge.theverge.cominvestopedia.com
The three individuals are expected to join Wang's AGI acceleration group and be immediately incorporated into the training system for the LLM + multimodal fusion model "Llama 5 Ultra," according to insiders.

6. Has OpenAI's "Defense Line" Collapsed?

Altman had previously stated that "the best talent remains," buttheguardian.com these three were considered the "backbone of the next-generation visual division" within the company.
From OpenAI's internal Slack, a post leaked saying, "Meta's resources are attractive, but there is no guarantee that the openness of research will be maintained," highlighting a structure where stricter confidentiality obligations could "suffocate" researchers.

7. Market and Regulatory Reactions

Meta's stock rose 0.8% the next day, but some argue that the valuation is rather high due to the "inflation of talent acquisition costs." Meanwhile, the EU Competition Commission commented that "AI talent transactions could directly lead to market dominance" and is considering applying antitrust laws to labor mobility.

8. Impact from Japan's Perspective

Associate Professor Kono from the Matsuo Lab at the University of Tokyo told our magazine, "The transfer signifies a shift to an era where 'employers, not locations, define the research environment.'" Startups also expressed concerns that "European GPU resources will be squeezed as a side effect, leading to increased computing costs in Japan."

9. Delving Deeper into Social Media Trends

According to the buzz analysis tool "JX Radar," negative emotions (anger, distrust) accounted for 28%, positive (expectation, praise) for 34%, and the rest were neutral. Cynicism about "buying dreams with money" and support for "researchers' free choice" were almost evenly matched. SFGate described this as "evidence that the Bay Area AI talent market has reached a fever pitch."sfgate.com

10. The Ethics of "Can Talent Be Bought?"

The current situation, where annual incomes exceeding 1 billion yen are being discussed, strengthens the trend of viewing talent as "capital goods." From the standpoint that AI research should be a public good, this poses a serious ethical conflict. The transparency of research, the maintenance of open models, and public interest—all of these need to be reevaluated as values that cannot be measured by money.

11. The Future of the AGI Roadmap

Meta aims for a "tenfold reduction in inference costs and double performance" for a general-purpose model by the end of 2026, and with this reinforcement, they calculate that they can advance the performance of the visual system by at least half a year. Meanwhile, OpenAI plans to release the next "GPT-NeoVision," and the "first-move competition" between the two companies is expected to become even more intense.

12. Conclusion: Towards an Era of Unstoppable Fluidity

From a different perspective, the huge offers can also be seen as "just putting a fair price on the scarcity value of researchers." However, if the scale is biased towards one company, the diversity of innovation will be compromised. How to balance capital and ideology—that may be the true game-changer in the AGI era.