Mirror Review
June 27, 2025
Summary:
- Meta has hired Lucas Beyer, a well-regarded AI researcher who previously worked on OpenAI’s CLIP and Gemini-like models.
- Reports suggested Meta offered bonuses upwards of $100 million, but Beyer denied it.
- This move comes as Big Tech companies compete fiercely for top AI talent to build more reasoning-capable AI systems.
On June 26, Meta confirmed it had hired Lucas Beyer, a top AI scientist from OpenAI, to work on long-term reasoning and cognitive modeling in AI.
He will be joined by fellow former OpenAI technical staff members Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, who also departed to join the Mark Zuckerberg-led company.
There are also rumors regarding Lucas Beyer’s $100M signing bonus, though Beyer himself dismissed this speculation.
Why Meta Hiring An OpenAI Researcher Is A Strategic Bet
1. Racing to Build “Reasoning AI”
Meta isn’t chasing GPT-style chatbots anymore. It’s investing in a deeper, more reasoning-oriented approach to AI.
Beyer will reportedly work on AI systems that can think more like humans, not just predict text.
“We’re building agents that can plan, reason, and act,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year.
2. Talent War With OpenAI and Google DeepMind
By hiring Beyer, Meta is sending a message: It’s willing to outbid and outbuild.
Beyer, Kolesnikov, and Zhai were members of the technical staff at OpenAI since December 2024, after being poached from rival Google DeepMind.
Their move to Meta shows the crazy competition for talent among AI firms.
Meta has also reportedly hired over 50 top researchers from Google DeepMind and OpenAI, as per reports.
These hires are helping Meta build its own FAIR team 2.0—a research-first version of AI development.
Reports claim the company is hiring a 50-person “Superintelligence” team to ramp up its AI efforts, and Meta has also purchased a $14 billion stake in Scale AI to bring CEO Alexandr Wang into the fold.
3. Cutting Reliance on Third-Party AI Models
Meta’s earlier AI offerings, including LLaMA and Code LLaMA, were solid—but lacked the multimodal depth of competitors like OpenAI’s GPT-4o.
With hires like Beyer, Meta aims to design AI from scratch with more control over quality, safety, and reasoning depth.
4. Reputation Boost in the AI Research Community
By pulling in names like Lucas Beyer—who co-authored CLIP, a major OpenAI breakthrough—Meta also earns credibility.
It’s not just building flashy products. It’s backing its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team with minds who’ve already shaped the AI landscape.
5. Building AI for the Metaverse (Still)
Despite a slowdown in metaverse hype, Meta is still working on AI agents that can interact across virtual and real spaces.
Beyer’s past work in multimodal and image-text models directly ties into this—especially for building intelligent avatars or assistants that “understand” more than just language.
6. To Future-Proof Meta’s AI Stack
The AI world is shifting toward models that can reason, reflect, and generalize across tasks.
Hiring researchers like Beyer allows Meta to build next-gen foundation models, designed for broader, open-ended reasoning, not just reactive answers.
The Controversy Around That $100M Bonus
Much of the public conversation focused on rumors that Meta offered $100 million in bonuses to lure OpenAI employees. But Beyer denied this.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself called the offers “crazy” earlier this month, stating on the podcast Uncapped that “They started making these like, giant offers, to a lot of people on our team—$100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp per year.”
He added, “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.”
However, Beyer posted on X that it was “fake news” that Zuckerberg was paying him that level of compensation.
A commenter on X speculated that Altman “clearly just threw out the 100m figure out there to make potential takers think that they were being lowballed,” to which Beyer responded, “Yes, it was a brilliant move, gotta give him that.”
It’s worth noting that Zuckerberg famously earns only $1 as CEO at Meta, although the company provides him a $14 million allowance for security-related costs for him and his family.
He holds about 13% of the stock, and his fortune is valued at $250 billion by Forbes.
Among Meta’s top-paid executives, Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan was paid the most last year, with compensation valued at $25.5 million.
No other top executive at Meta has been paid $100 million in any of the past three years, according to the company’s financial filings.
The median of the total annual compensation for all Meta employees other than Zuckerberg was $417,400 last year.
That controversy reflects the growing divide between OpenAI’s more product-focused direction under Microsoft’s influence and Meta’s open-source and long-term research approach.
What This Means for the AI Industry
Meta’s aggressive poaching proves that top AI researchers now hold the kind of power once reserved for startup founders.
With Apple also quietly building its own AI teams, and OpenAI reportedly tightening its internal policies post-defections, the AI talent war is no longer just about who builds faster—it’s about who hires smarter.
Conclusion
When Meta hires OpenAI researchers, it’s not just filling seats—it’s shaping its future.
This hiring reflects Meta’s shift toward foundational AI research, talent-first innovation, and a long game in both metaverse and reasoning-based AI.
