Meta Platforms’ two-month-old Superintelligence Labs initiative is already losing senior staff, underscoring the intensity of the industry’s competition for artificial-intelligence specialists. Wired reported that researchers Avi Verma and Ethan Knight left the division in August after less than a month and have re-joined their former employer, OpenAI. A third researcher, Rishabh Agarwal, also resigned, while Meta’s long-time director of generative-AI product management, Chaya Nayak, is set to join OpenAI’s special-initiatives team. Business Insider separately counted at least eight departures from the group, including engineers recruited during Meta’s summer hiring spree. The exits follow a recruiting campaign in which Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg dangled nine-figure compensation offers to accelerate work on so-called artificial general intelligence. The turnover adds to organisational turbulence inside Meta’s AI operations. The company has repeatedly reorganised its machine-learning teams and this month split the Superintelligence Labs into four units. Former OpenAI vice-president Peter Deng said the escalating ‘talent war’ is widening pay disparities across the technology sector, a dynamic that HR departments will eventually have to confront. Meta told investors in July that it expects to spend US$66 billion to US$72 billion this year—largely on data centres and AI talent—and has begun striking partnership deals, including a technical collaboration with image-generation start-up Midjourney. The early defections, however, suggest the social-media group may struggle to retain the expertise it needs to compete with OpenAI and other rivals in the race toward superintelligent systems.