OpenAI Readies Itself for Its Facebook Era

The startup has imported a massive number of former Meta staff and has turned its attention to strategies favored by the older tech giant for boosting revenue and users.

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This summer, Fidji Simo wasted no time addressing a concern among many at OpenAI.

Leading her first all-hands meeting as the startup’s new CEO of applications, she acknowledged that she and many others at OpenAI shared the same background: They’d previously worked at Meta Platforms. And then Simo, who’d risen to be head of Facebook over a decade at Meta, offered reassurance—she wasn’t interested in redoing her tenure at Meta and wanted to do things differently at OpenAI, according to two current employees at OpenAI. But her words didn’t put everyone in the crowd at ease.

In the three years since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, the company has seen an influx of leadership and staff from Meta—even as Meta has poached liberally from OpenAI in recent months. Of the people who list OpenAI as their current employer on LinkedIn, approximately 630 previously worked for Meta, which represents about 20% of the roughly 3,000 total employees at OpenAI, according to an analysis by The Information. The contingent is so large that OpenAI’s Slack has a channel just for former Meta employees, according to one of the current employees.