After weeks of internal turmoil and high-profile poaching by competitors, the company behind Chatgpt is trying to re-attack, starting with its own poaching.
The past month has been especially bruised by Openai. Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, raided some of the company’s top AI talents, luring about a dozen elite researchers with large sums of funds, greater autonomy, greater autonomy and a shared mission to build artificial universal intelligence (AGI).
Stable outlet flow damages morale. In response, OpenAI gave all employees a week off to charge. But now, the company seems to be opposing its own recruitment victory.
According to Wired, Openai quietly hired four high-profile engineers from rival companies. These include David Lau, Tesla’s vice president of software engineering; Uday Ruddarraju is the former director of infrastructure engineering for Elon Musk Xai and X (formerly Twitter); Mike Dalton, also from Xai; Angera Fan, an AI researcher at AIS, who previously worked at Meta. Dalton and Ruddarraju are both key engineers at Xai’s massive supercomputer project Colossus.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke to reporters Wednesday at the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley conference, an elite gathering of elite technology and media executives who avoided defectors.
“We have a very talented team,” Ultraman said. “And I think they really like what they’re doing. Obviously, some people go to different places. There’s a lot of excitement in the industry.”
Sam Altman was asked about his feelings about Zuck and Meta poaching Openai’s top talents.
“Very good…good…” he said.
Behind the glasses designed by Jony Ive, I couldn’t see his eyes. But I can feel the pain.
Zuck’s talent for poaching Openai is not difficult, not only because he is rich, but also because he is not very difficult. pic.twitter.com/prtigml0wu
– Yuchen Jin (@yuchenj_uw) July 8, 2025
Still, Openai seems eager to shift the narrative from crisis to product innovation.
According to Reuters, the company is preparing to launch its own AI-powered web browser, a direct challenge to Google Chrome and the latest signal that Openai hopes to experience the entire AI user.
The browser will reportedly integrate OpenAI’s Web-Browsing AI proxy and rethink how users search and navigate online. Instead of redirecting it to a third-party site, browsers can instead move user interaction directly in Chatgpt, an experience that can reshape how people interact with the Internet. This also shows that Openai is seeking more first-party user data and is less dependent on major players such as Google.
The move was announced by competitors’ confusion, Comet, its AI-local browser, which launched on Wednesday, July 9.
“The Comet is a web browser built for today’s internet,” Perpolxity wrote in a blog post. “Over the past 30 years, the Internet has evolved from what we simply browse or search for. The Internet is where we live, work and connect.”
Confused says that users can ask Comet to compare product delivery speeds across sites, summarize articles, explain difficult concepts, or generate new ideas based on whatever they view on the page.
Meanwhile, Openai is expected to release an open source version of its inference model next week, a strategic game that competes directly with Meta, which has already been heavily inclined to open source AI development as a way to build influence and gain developer Mindshare.
The bet is high. Openai’s position as the dominant force in Generative AI is no longer given. Between Meta’s growing talent pool, the rise of confusion, and ongoing scrutiny of its governance and aligned with Microsoft, Openai now finds itself at a critical moment: recovery momentum or risk losing the lead.
The company did not respond to a request for comment.
