OpenAI hired Google employees to do 'instrumental' work on ChatGPT before its launch, report says

• OpenAI has hired more than 12 of Google's AI employees, The Information reported, citing sources.
• At least five ex-Google researchers worked on OpenAI's ChatGPT before it launched, a source said.

OpenAI has reportedly been luring away some of Google's AI employees.

In recent months, the startup behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT and image generator DALL-E has hired more than a dozen former Google workers, The Information reported, citing sources.

At least five former Google researchers were instrumental in getting the company's viral chatbot ChatGPT ready to launch in November, a person with knowledge of the matter told the publication.

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The researchers — Barret Zoph, Liam Fedus, Luke Metz, Jacob Menick, and Rapha Gontijo Lopes — were all cited in the acknowledgments section of OpenAI's blog post announcing the launch of ChatGPT.

However, at the time of writing, just two of them — Zoph and Metz — had updated their LinkedIn profiles to reflect the reported job change.

OpenAI's chatbot proved to be widely popular with users, amassing more than one million users in its first week. The chatbot's popularity reportedly pushed Google's management to declare a "code red" the following month.

Two former employees at Google Brain, Alphabet's AI division, told The Information that some staff felt the culture had become lethargic. The staff cited layers of red tape and too much caution over new product initiatives, leading some workers to look for jobs elsewhere, the publication reported.

Google appears to be engaged in a tense race with Microsoft, a prominent investor in OpenAI, to bring new products to market.

The two tech giants have both announced plans to incorporate large language models (LLMs) into Bing and Google Search. Bing has already opened the new tech to some users, while Google announced last week its AI search was opening to "trusted testers" before launching more widely.

Google and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment made outside normal working hours.