OpenAI Just Planted Its Flag in London — And DeepMind Should Be Sweating
The AI talent wars just opened a major new front. OpenAI announced Thursday that London will become its largest research hub outside the United States — a move that puts it on a direct collision course with Google DeepMind in one of the world’s richest pools of AI talent. This isn’t about opening a satellite office. It’s about who gets to build the future of AI, and where. From 30 Researchers to a Core Research Mandate OpenAI currently has about 30 researchers in London, a presence it established in 2023. The company won’t say how many new hires it plans or how much it’s investing. What it will say is that London researchers will “own key components of OpenAI’s frontier model development” — specifically safety, evaluation, alignment, and reliability. ...