As OpenAI pushes forward with its hardware ambitions, its aggressive hiring spree is quickly becoming another retention challenge for Apple. Here’s what’s going on.
OpenAI hiring ‘people from nearly every relevant Apple department’
When OpenAI announced its deal to acquire Jony Ive’s AI-focused company, io, a trademark lawsuit revealed interesting details about how Ive reunited with Evans Hankey and Tang Tan, two longtime collaborators from his years at Apple.
Soon after that, a Bloomberg report showed that OpenAI had hired other Apple alumni, including Cyrus Daniel, who worked at Apple’s human interface design team for 15 years, Matt Theobald, who worked on manufacturing design at Apple for almost 20 years, and Erik de Jong, who partly led the Apple Watch design team.
That, it turns out, was just the tip of the iceberg. In his Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman reported last weekend that OpenAI has been stepping up its hardware engineering hiring spree, bringing in over 40 people just in the past month, many of whom came straight from Apple:
“From what I’ve heard, Apple is none too pleased about OpenAI’s poaching, and some consider it a problem. The hires include key directors (a fairly senior designation), as well as managers and engineers. And they hail from a wide range of areas: camera engineering, iPhone hardware, Mac hardware, silicon, device testing and reliability, industrial design, manufacturing, audio, smartwatches, Vision Pro development, software, and human factors. In other words, OpenAI is picking up people from nearly every relevant Apple department. It’s remarkable.”
OpenAI’s hiring spree adds to Apple’s brain drain woes, particularly from competitors who are much better positioned in the AI field or are investing heavily in hopes of becoming so.
There’s been no shortage of reports about top AI researchers and software engineers leaving Apple for competitors, especially Meta.
And now, with the hardware engineering and design teams also seeing an increase in departures, it seems that the company’s competitiveness concerns may soon extend beyond just AI.
Accessory deals on Amazon