OpenAI opens office in Switzerland – including new employees
A new branch of OpenAI is being established in Zurich. Three employees from Google's DeepMind are joining the team there.
(Image: Shutterstock/ioda)
OpenAI has its headquarters in San Francisco. The AI company is now opening a new headquarters in Switzerland. A new office is being built in Zurich. Three AI experts who previously worked at Google DeepMind are also joining the Swiss team.
Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai are three leading researchers in the field of multimodal AI, according to OpenAI. "The advancement of multimodal AI, which is able to understand and combine different types of information such as text, images and sounds, plays a central role in realizing OpenAI's goal of developing versatile and general AI that is safe, accessible and useful for all people," writes OpenAI in a press release.
Beyer was previously a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind and is an expert in robust and scalable AI models that seamlessly integrate different data modalities. Kolesnikov held the same job title and his responsibilities include researching innovations in deep learning for visual recognition and analysis. Zhai was Senior Staff Research at DeepMind and brings extensive experience in multimodal learning and computer vision, according to PM.
"We are very excited to welcome Lucas, Alexander and Xiaohua to OpenAI. Their expertise and groundbreaking work in multimodal AI is recognized across the industry and will be critical as we continue to develop technologies capable of learning from the world and enabling increasingly complex interactions," said Mark Chen, senior vice president of research at OpenAI.
OpenAI is working on AGI but also agents and hardware
OpenAI already has offices in Dublin, London, Paris and Brussels. However, the focus there is less on the development of new technologies, as is now apparently the case in the Swiss office. OpenAI also writes that the recruitment indicates that the company wants to unite the world's best talents in order to "develop general artificial intelligence that benefits everyone". OpenAI is not pursuing this goal.
It is unclear which part of the development will be outsourced to Switzerland with the new additions. OpenAI is working on general artificial intelligence (AGI), but there are of course other smaller steps along the way. AI models are being improved, structures are being changed and a lot of work is currently being done to see whether there could be other methods of improving models besides scaling.
Most providers are currently focusing on AI agents as well as their own hardware. OpenAI in San Francisco, for example, is working on its own device that should be "less disruptive" than the iPhone. To this end, they are working with the office of former Apple chief designer, Jony Ive.
(emw)
