Meta Platforms Inc. has hired four notable artificial intelligence researchers from OpenAI, ramping up its hiring spree for its Superintelligence group. The company has signed on Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren, according to people with knowledge of the matter. These researchers join several other AI industry leaders, including Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, heading to Alexandr Wang’s new team at the social networking giant.
At OpenAI, Yu led the Perception team, while Bi, Zhao, and Ren were also notable researchers at the company. The departures underscore the mounting competition for talent in the generative AI landscape as key players are lured by multi-million dollar hiring packages.
This move is part of Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive strategy to elevate Meta's position in the AI industry, where it has been playing catch-up to competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The hired researchers will likely contribute to developing Meta's AI reasoning models, a key area for the company's Superintelligence team.
Meta's recruitment efforts extend beyond these four researchers, with the company reportedly offering substantial financial incentives, including $100 million signing bonuses, to attract top talent. Other researchers who have joined Meta's Superintelligence team include Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, who previously worked at Google DeepMind and helped launch OpenAI's Zurich office.
The hiring spree fits squarely within Meta's wider push into AI, with the company recently investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI, a key player in data labeling, an essential ingredient for training large language models. As part of that deal, Scale AI's 28-year-old founder Alexandr Wang also joined Meta's superintelligence team.
