The Big Tech firms are in a race to acquire experienced AI talent onto their teams, as the race to develop the Artificial Intelligence technology heats up globally. After Meta roped in numerous AI experts from rival companies, in a fresh development, a senior Meta researcher has quit to join OpenAI. Chaya Nayak, who had been with Meta for nearly a decade, announced the development through a LinkedIn post.
Nayak had been working on Meta’s AI generative AI initiatives for the last two and half years. She was a key part of the team that developed three generations of Meta AI’s Llama large language models (LLMs).
At OpenAI, Nayak will be working on “special initiatives” with Irina Kofman, who heads these often ambiguous and cross-functional AI projects at the company.
“I’m joining OpenAI to work on special initiatives – exploring new opportunities at the frontier of AI. It feels like the perfect next chapter: to take everything I’ve learned, and pour it into work that will help define what comes next for technology and society,” she said.
During her tenure at Meta, Nayak contributed towards the company’s first steps in exploring the machine learning (ML) technology alongside cybersecurity initiatives that included data cleaning and differential privacy features.
OpenAI’s bid to hire Nayak indicates that the company is looking to try more AI usercases, perhaps around privacy. The pay-scale at which Nayak has been roped-in by OpenAI remains undisclosed.
For Meta, however, Nayak’s departure could be a notable hit as the company takes active measures to dive deeper into AI. In the last few months, the company has managed to poached AI talent from multiple firms, especially Apple. The company offered salaries hitting a billion dollars a year, just to get top AI experts to join its AI-focused Superintelligence Labs team.
Last month, Meta honcho Mark Zuckerberg announced the appointment of Shengjia Zhao as the chief scientist of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs unit. Zhao is best known for playing a key role in developing OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot, ChatGTP.
Among Meta, OpenAI, and other Big Tech firms, it seems that the carousel of AI talent will continue to revolve in the coming times. The companies and tech moguls are betting billions to explore the technology.