OpenAI gives ‘wellness week’ for drained out employees amid hiring pressure from Meta; Check here
OpenAI, the developer and research unit behind ChatGPT, has announced a company-wide ‘wellness week’ for the coming week, amid reports of employee burnout and aggressive recruitment efforts by the social media giant Meta, targeting its top researchers.
According to a recent report by WIRED, the “shutdown of ChatGPT for a week” is intended as a “rest and recharge” break for employees after months of 80-hour workweeks. It is also seen as a strategic move to counter the talent drain to Meta, which has reportedly offered compensation packages of up to $100 million to lure OpenAI researchers.
OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer, Mark Chen, reportedly sent a strong message to staff on Saturday, stating that the company will directly compete with the social media giant to retain and attract top research talent.
WIRED shared details of the memo, which was sent via Slack to all OpenAI employees, following reports that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had hired four senior researchers for its superintelligence lab.
I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something... Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by,” the memo read.
Chen noted that he, along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other top leaders, has been “working around the clock to talk to those with offers.”
“We’ve been more proactive than ever before—we’re recalibrating compensation and scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent,” he added.
The urgency of the situation was clear throughout the memo, where Chen described himself as someone with “high personal standards of fairness.”
“While I’ll fight to keep every one of you, I won’t do so at the price of fairness to others.”
The memo, framed around a “weeklong wellness break,” appears to be a form of damage control as the talent war between OpenAI and Meta intensifies. The social media giant is reportedly luring some of OpenAI’s top AI researchers. Recently, a tech employee posted on X.com that four leading researchers had been poached by Meta, adding, “I feel really disappointed that the leadership didn’t keep them.”
Another OpenAI technical staff member, Lucas Beyer, posted, “Yes, will be joining Meta”—though he noted he did not receive a $100 million offer.
According to WIRED, CEO Sam Altman said in a podcast with his brother Jack Altman, “Zuckerberg is quite aggressively approaching top researchers, offering up to $100 million in signing bonuses and first-year compensation.”
Chen echoed this sentiment in his memo, “Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort, and has repeatedly (and mostly unsuccessfully) tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages.”
The memo also referenced seven other research leaders who urged team members to stay at OpenAI.
“If they pressure you or make ridiculous exploding offers, just tell them to back off—it’s not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision,” one researcher said.
“I’d like to be able to talk you through it, and I know all about their offers.”
WIRED’s report also cited sources close to Meta’s recruitment efforts, stating that the company is increasing its push to hire top researchers, particularly from OpenAI and Google. Researchers at Anthropic, another top AI rival, were reportedly seen as “less of a culture fit” for Meta. “They haven’t necessarily expanded the pay band,” one source said, “but for top talent, the sky is the limit.”
Rowang Cheung, founder of The Rundown, however, claimed that Meta has poached at least eight OpenAI researchers.
As per the memo of Meta CEO Zuckerberg, Alexandr Wang has joined as Chief AI Officer and lead MSL. Wang has previously led ScaleAI as CEO and founder. CEO Zuckerberg welcomed him saying, "Alex and I have worked together for several years, and I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation. He has a clear sense of the historic importance of superintelligence, and as co-founder and CEO, he built ScaleAI into a fast-growing company involved in the development of almost all leading models across the industry."
He also welcomed Nathaniel Dourif Friedman, adding, "Nat Friedman has also joined Meta to partner with Alex to lead MSL, heading our work on AI products and applied research. Nat will work with Connor to define his role going forward. He ran GitHub at Microsoft and most recently has run one of the leading AI investment firms. Nat has served on our Meta Advisory Group for the last year, so he already has a good sense of our roadmap and what we need to do."
Here are the list of all top AI researchers poached from OpenAI and Google:
- Trapit Bansal – Pioneered RL on chain of thought and co-creator of the o-series models at OpenAI.
- Shuchao Bi – Co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. Previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAI.
- Huiwen Chang – Co-creator of GPT-4o’s image generation, and previously invented MaskGIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research.
- Ji Lin – Helped build o3/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, 4o-imagegen, and the Operator reasoning stack.
- Joel Pobar – Worked on inference at Anthropic. Previously at Meta for 11 years working on HHVM, Hack, Flow, Redex, performance tooling, and machine learning.
- Jack Rae – Pre-training tech lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2.5. Led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind.
- Hongyu Ren – Co-creator of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o3, and o4-mini. Previously led a group for post-training at OpenAI.
- Johan Schalkwyk – Former Google Fellow, early contributor to Sesame, and technical lead for Maya.
- Pei Sun – Focused on post-training, coding, and reasoning for Gemini at Google DeepMind. Previously created the last two generations of Waymo’s perception models.
- Jiahui Yu – Co-creator of o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1, and GPT-4o. Previously led the perception team at OpenAI and co-led multimodal at Gemini.