A list of recent hires has been released by Facebook, which includes individuals who previously held positions with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
As part of Meta’s newly formed artificial superintelligence lab, the poached AI researchers will be led by Alexandr Wang, the co-founder of Scale AI, which last month received an investment of $14.3 billion from Meta.
The Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) team is taking shape.
MSL’s chief AI officer will be Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, who will lead the lab’s efforts in artificial superintelligence. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-direct the lab, focusing on AI products and applied research.
Besides Wang and Friedman, here are the following AI researchers joining MSL, as per Wang’s post on X:
- Trapit Bansal: pioneered RL on chain of thought and cocreator of o-series models at OpenAl.
- Shuchao Bi: cocreator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. Previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAl.
- Huiwen Chang: cocreator of GPT-4o’s image generation, and previously invented MaskIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research.
- Ji Lin: helped build 03/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, 40-imagegen, and Operator reasoning stack.
- Joel Pobar: inference at Anthropic. Previously at Meta for 11 years on HHVM, Hack, Flow, Redex, performance tooling, and machine learning.
- Jack Rae: pre-training tech lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2.5. Led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind.
- Hongyu Ren: cocreator of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, 03 and o4-mini. Previously leading a group for post-training at OpenAl.
- Johan Schalkwyk: former Google Fellow, early contributor to Sesame, and technical lead for Maya.
- Pei Sun: post-training, coding, and reasoning for Gemini at Google Deepmind. Previously created the last two generations of Waymo’s perception models.
- Jiahui Yu: cocreator of 03, 04-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o. Previously led the perception team at OpenAl, and co-led multimodal at Gemini.
- Shengjia Zhao: cocreator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models, 4.1 and 03. Previously led synthetic data at OpenAl.
A number of promising researchers have also been personally contacted by Zuckerberg, after their published academic work has been reviewed. A major part of Meta’s strategy is its belief that assembling the right talent will be key to dominating the next era of artificial general intelligence (AGI). By proactively courting elite minds, Meta is making a bold and unusually public move in the ongoing AI talent wars. While talent poaching isn’t new in the tech industry, this episode stands out for its openness and aggressive scale, marking a fascinating chapter in the race toward artificial superintelligence.
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