OpenAI Reshuffle: How Meta, Google and other AI companies may benefit from OpenAI reshuffle

The drama of the OpenAI board firing CEO Sam Altman last week and then reinstating him in the same capacity three days later may have provided an opportunity for rival tech giants to bolster their teams with research scientists from the company, which has been credited to have made AI technology mainstream.
While Salesforce and Microsoft executives have already floated open invitations for OpenAI researchers to join their companies, a report suggested that there was an influx of CVs in Google with OpenAI employees showing a desire to jump ship.
Sam Altman’s firing saga
Soon after Altman was removed, several employees quit the company. Little did they know that the drama would soon end with Altman coming back to the company in the same capacity. There is no information on whether those who quit will get the job back at the Microsoft-backed company or they will move on. In any case, there seems to be good news for them.
Amid the three-daya saga, Microsoft was seen as the ‘winner’ as it quickly moved to hire Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman, who also quit after Altman was fired and is now back at OpenAI.
The ‘job offers’
In a post on X, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff invited OpenAI researchers who quit the platform to work for Salesforce. He also announced plans to help those whose immigration was impacted by Open AI on O1, H1B, or other visas.

Meanwhile, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott also floated an open invitation to OpenAI researchers looking to move on from the company. He also offered a similar deal that the Salesforce CEO promised.
How Meta and Google can benefit
A report by The Information said that OpenAI rivals like Cohere and Adept made efforts to recruit employees from the ChatGPT maker and Google DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned AI arm also resumes from OpenAI workers.
The question is, “Why?” This ‘response to stimuli’ was recently explained by a user on Threads and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun approved it.
“Everyone is saying MSFT is the big winner of the OpenAI fiasco. But I can easily see META being the big winner in the end. If you’re an AI researcher and you’re going to work at big tech, it might as well be the company with the largest open source and public research presence,” a user said.
LeCun replied, “Yup”, as a sign of affirmation of the deduction. In September, Meta officially entered the AI chatbot wars by releasing its own assistant and a slew of AI characters in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
Meta is eyeing to include AI for everything – from planning a trip with friends in a group chat to answering questions you’d normally ask a search engine and for that, it even announced a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing to provide real-time web results.
As a result, Meta will need trained AI professionals to fine-tune and further develop AI models for the future.
Similar is the case with Google. The company, though considered playing catchup in terms of bringing AI innovation to the public, is working on bringing sophisticated AI models into its vast portfolio of products.
Earlier this year, Google merged Google Brain and DeepMind teams working on AI technology to create Google DeepMind that will expedite the company’s efforts in this space. Google has, in recent weeks, announced various AI capabilities to its array of services, including Search and YouTube. Google also announced that it is bringing Bard to Google Assistant to expand its capabilities.
It is imperative that the companies working in AI development will need trained researchers to work on their projects and getting some from a company like OpenAI is likely a win-win situation for them.