OpenAI announced today it has hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from rival Google DeepMind, all of whom will work in a newly opened OpenAI office in Zurich, Switzerland. OpenAI executives told staff during an internal meeting on Tuesday that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai will be joining the company to work on multimodal AI, artificial intelligence models capable of performing tasks in different mediums ranging from images to audio.

OpenAI has long been at the forefront of multimodal AI and released the first version of its text-to-image platform Dall-E in 2021. Its flagship chatbot ChatGPT, however, was initially only capable of interacting with text inputs. The company later added voice and image features as multimodal functionality became an increasingly important part of its product line and AI research. (The latest version of Dall-E is available directly within ChatGPT.) OpenAI has also developed a highly anticipated generative AI video product called Sora, though it has yet to make it widely available.

All three of the newly hired researchers already work closely together, according to Beyer's personal website. While he worked at DeepMind, Beyer appears to have kept a close eye on the research that OpenAI was publishing and public controversies the company was embroiled in, which he frequently posted about to his more than 70,000 followers on X. When CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI by its board of directors last year, Beyer posted that “the most sensible” explanation for the firing he had read so far was that Altman was inv...