Meta just hired OpenAI's Luke Metz, the guy behind DALL-E and Sora

Meta hired OpenAI researcher Luke Metz for their AI team. Metz was the lead on DALL-E 2 and the first version of Sora — the video model that made headlines last year. He's one of the few people who's actually shipped a top-tier generative model from scratch.

This is the kind of hire that signals where the next wave is going. Meta is building Llama models and pushing them into every product — search, WhatsApp, their ad system, the whole stack. Metz brings hands-on experience building diffusion and video models at scale. That's the gap they're filling.

The bigger story is the brain drain between the two labs. OpenAI keeps losing researchers to competitors, and Meta is actively poaching the people who've proven they can ship. Metz is the latest in a line — people who built OpenAI's flagship models and then left. The models aren't the moat anymore; the people are.

Why this matters for us: Meta's AI is going into everything we use — search, WhatsApp, the apps our families rely on — and the people building it are jumping ship between the labs, not staying put.