OpenAI opens branch office in Zurich

OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT released in 2021, is setting up its fifth European office in Zurich. As the San Francisco-based company informed its employees in an internal memo published by the North American computer magazine "Wired", the new Zurich branch will be headed by Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai from Google DeepMind, a competitor also based in Zurich.

The three engineers for computer vision and machine learning have been hired to work on multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) models for OpenAi. These models should be able to perform tasks in different media, i.e. from images to audio. "We are delighted to expand our international presence with the opening of our office in Zurich, which has become a leading European technology center," Mark Chen is quoted as saying in an article in the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung". He is Senior Vice President for Research at OpenAI.

According to Beyer's private website, he also co-led the multimodal research activities and the codebase at DeepMind, where he worked closely with Xiaohua Zhai and Alexander Kolesnikov. Beyer had frequently reported on OpenAI's research results to his approximately 70,000 followers on X and commented on public controversies surrounding the company.

OpenAI already has offices in London, Tokyo and other cities. In addition to the new offices in Zurich, the previously non-profit company is reportedly planning to open further branches in New York City, Seattle, Brussels, Paris and Singapore.

The Financial Times reported earlier this year that Apple had also poached a number of AI experts from Google to work in a "secret European lab in Zurich". ce/mm