The battle between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman for the industry’s top AI talent shows no signs of cooling off. This time, Zuckerberg appears to have secured two more researchers from OpenAI. 

Citing unnamed sources close to the matter, Wired reports that OpenAI researchers Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung are making their way over to Meta. 

While at OpenAI, Wei worked on OpenAI’s o3 and deep research models. Chung also worked on the company’s deep research models with his research focusing on reasoning and agents. Meta and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo.

While neither Wei or Chung have publicly confirmed the move, they both recently posted cryptic messages on their X (formerly Twitter) profiles.  Wei wrote that his research in reinforcement learning (RL), a method for training AI, has taught him “an important lesson” about how to live his own life. “The lesson of doing RL on policy is that beating the teacher requires walking your own path and taking risks and rewards from the environment,” he wrote. 

Wei also reposted a video lecture that Chung uploaded to his X profile early this morning. In the caption, Chung muses on how AI can be leveraged to boost productivity. “It’s cliché to say AI will create massive wealth,” Chung wrote. “But using this leverage lens lets us interpret the noisy AI news cycle in a consistent way and spot the real opportunities.” 

Both researchers also did time at Google before joining OpenAI, adding to the growing trend of talent flowing from Google to OpenAI to Meta. Back in June, Meta scooped up three researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich office, all of whom were Google alums. So far, Meta has managed to recruit at least 11 former OpenAI employees.  

Meta’s recent hiring spree is part of a broader push to strengthen its AI efforts following the underwhelming launch of its latest model. Zuckerberg has reportedly offered pay packages worth up to $100 million to attract top talent to his new superintelligence lab. Meta has also recently invested $14 billion in the AI startup Scale and tapped its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to help lead the lab. Zuckerberg reportedly even tried — and failed — to recruit OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman.

For his part, Altman is putting on a brave face. The Wall Street Journal reported that at an event in June Altman said that his best people had not left the company. “It’s like, OK, Zuckerberg is doing some new insane thing. What’s next?” Altman said. 

Altman has also been recruiting talent himself, poaching engineers from xAI, Tesla, and Meta.