OpenAI has announced plans to turn its London office into its largest research hub outside of the United States.<\/p>\n
The company\u2014which established a UK office<\/a> in 2023\u2014says it will expand its London-based research team, scooping up talent emerging from leading British universities. It has not indicated how many researchers it will hire.<\/p>\n \u201cThe UK brings together world-class talent and leading scientific institutions and universities, making it an ideal place to deliver the important research which will ensure our AI is safe, useful, and benefits everyone,\u201d said Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, in a statement.<\/p>\n The plans bring OpenAI into direct competition for top research talent with Google DeepMind, the AI lab run by British researcher Demis Hassabis<\/a>, which is headquartered in London. DeepMind has long-running partnerships with Oxford University and the University of Cambridge, where it sponsors professorships<\/a>, funds research<\/a>, and works alongside researchers<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the latest careers fair at Oxford University, the floor was packed with undergraduates looking for technical roles and recruiters hiring for AI-related positions. \u201cThe demand and supply is increasing on both sides, even within a year,\u201d says Jonathan Black, director of the careers service at Oxford University. \u201cTo have something like this turn up is a really positive sign.\u201d<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s expansion in London could have a sort-of flywheel effect, whereby the researchers it hires early in their careers go on to start new labs in the UK, says Tom Wilson, partner at venture capital firm Seedcamp. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen many examples over the years,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s where these kinds of announcements can have even more impact than the initial hires \u2026 the second-order effects can be great.\u201d<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s team in London will continue to contribute to products like Codex and GPT-5.2, the company says, but will now \u201cown\u201d certain aspects of model development relating to safety, reliability, and performance evaluation.<\/p>\n In a statement, the UK\u2019s science and technology secretary, Liz Kendall, described the announcement as \u201ca huge vote of confidence in the UK\u2019s world-leading position at the cutting edge of AI research.\u201d<\/p>\n The announcement coincides with a push in the UK<\/a> to scale the nation\u2019s data center and power infrastructure<\/a> to meet the voracious demand for compute among AI companies, including OpenAI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI has announced plans to turn its London office into its largest research hub outside of the United…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1604,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[1189,252,27,1187,1190,1188],"class_list":{"0":"post-1603","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-deepmind","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-london","11":"tag-openai","12":"tag-recruiting","13":"tag-research"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}