Meta Platforms has hired Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung, two senior research scientists credited with shaping some of OpenAI’s most advanced language models, according to reports from Wired and TechCrunch on 16 July. Wei is known for early work on chain-of-thought prompting and the o3 research team, while Chung was a core architect of Codex and GPT-4. The pair will join Meta’s fast-growing Superintelligence lab, extending a recruitment drive that has lured almost ten OpenAI employees in the past fortnight and five of the 21 researchers who built OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, people familiar with the moves said. The defections underscore the escalating competition among US tech giants for scarce expertise in frontier artificial-intelligence systems. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told The Information that Meta can fund “multiple multi-gigawatt” AI data centres with existing cash flow and will do “whatever it takes” to win the AI race. Analysts say the latest hires strengthen Meta’s position as deep-pocketed companies step up spending and talent acquisition to accelerate development of next-generation models.