Execuhires Round 2: Scale-Meta, Lamini-AMD, and Instacart-OpenAI
Meta hires Scale AI's Alexandr Wang to lead its new "Superintelligence" division following a $15 billion investment for a 49% stake in Scale. Lamini's Sharon Zhou joins AMD as VP of AI under Lisa Su, while Instacart's Fidji Simo becomes CEO of Apps at OpenAI under Sama. Meta offers over $10 million/year compensation packages to top researchers, successfully recruiting Jack Rae from Gemini. OpenAI releases o3-pro model to ChatGPT Pro users and API, outperforming o3 and setting new benchmarks like Extended NYT Connections and SnakeBench. Despite being slower than o1-pro, o3-pro excels in reasoning and complex problem-solving. OpenAI cuts o3 pricing by 80%, making it cheaper than GPT-4o and pressuring competitors like Google and Anthropic to lower prices. Users can now fine-tune the GPT-4.1 family using direct preference optimization (DPO) for subjective tasks.