OpenAI continues its international expansion by opening an office in Zurich, where three former researchers from Google and DeepMind join its ranks to work on multimodal AI.
OpenAI announced the opening of an office in Zurich. “We are […] “excited to expand our international presence with the opening of our office in Zurich, which is establishing itself as a leading technology hub in Europe,” said Mark Chen, Senior Vice President of Research at OpenAI .
The company behind ChatGPT says its Zurich office will host three specialists, all recruited from rivals Google and DeepMind. The three researchers are described by the company as “the world’s most renowned in the field of multimodal AI.” Lucas Beyer, formerly Staff Research Scientist at Google and DeepMind for 6.5 years, is a specialist in machine learning frameworks that power multimodal AI systems. Alexander Kolesnikov, also a former researcher at Google and DeepMind for six and a half years, has contributed to the progress of vision-based AI. Finally, Xiaohua Zhai, formerly Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google and DeepMind for a decade, specializes in multimodal learning and computer vision.
Certainly, OpenAI did not choose Zurich by chance to work on multimodal AI based in particular on computer vision. Because we know that this is a field of research in which the EPFZ excels (read our file on this subject: The robots of the future will have Swiss eyes). For the same reasons, the Meta group has also set its sights on Zurich to develop its solutions around virtual reality and the metaverse.
OpenAI is not the only GenAI player to have a presence on the banks of the Limmat. The commercial register has recently listed a Swiss subsidiary of Anthropic (publisher of LLM Claude) based in Zurich.
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