New Delhi: Meta is going all-in on artificial superintelligence with an aggressive hiring spree that’s turning heads across the AI world. The company has poached top researchers from rivals OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind to staff its newly launched Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). The elite 50-member unit will be led by Alexandr Wang, the co-founder of Scale AI, following Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in the company last month.
Wang announced the new hires on X, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the MSL initiative internally. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-lead the lab, which brings together foundational research and applied AI development. The recruitment has sparked backlash from OpenAI, whose chief research officer described Meta’s poaching as akin to “a home burglary.”
Meta Superintelligence Labs: The Leadership
At the helm of Meta’s ambitious AI unit is Alexandr Wang, appointed Chief AI Officer, with Nat Friedman co-leading the division. Together, they aim to push the boundaries of artificial superintelligence, drawing on top talent from across the tech industry.
Researchers Joining Meta
Here’s a look at the high-profile AI researchers joining Meta’s MSL team:
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Trapit Bansal – Co-creator of OpenAI’s o-series models and known for work on reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought prompting.
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Shuchao Bi – Helped build GPT-4o’s voice mode and o4-mini. Previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAI.
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Huiwen Chang – Led GPT-4o’s image generation and developed MaskIT and Muse text-to-image models at Google Research.
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Ji Lin – Played key roles in building GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, GPT-4o, and OpenAI’s Operator reasoning stack.
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Joel Pobar – Former Anthropic inference engineer and Meta veteran with deep experience in software performance and ML tooling.
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Jack Rae – Led pre-training and reasoning for Google DeepMind’s Gemini and helped launch Gopher and Chinchilla LLMs.
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Hongyu Ren – Co-creator of several mini-GPT models and previously led OpenAI’s post-training group.
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Johan Schalkwyk – Former Google Fellow and technical lead on major voice and AI projects including Sesame and Maya.
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Pei Sun – Worked on reasoning and coding for Gemini and developed Waymo’s recent perception systems.
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Jiahui Yu – Former leader of OpenAI’s perception team and co-lead of Gemini’s multimodal efforts.
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Shengjia Zhao – Helped build ChatGPT, GPT-4, and all mini models. Also led synthetic data generation at OpenAI.
The Road to Superintelligence
Meta’s move is part of a broader race among tech giants to build general-purpose AI models capable of reasoning, perception, and language. With top minds now under one roof, Meta hopes its Superintelligence Labs can give it an edge in this escalating arms race. As rivals voice concern over Meta’s tactics, the company remains focused on advancing toward AGI faster than ever before.