Who is part of Meta's AI 'dream team'? Full list of researchers
Days after OpenAI’s chief researcher likened Meta’s aggressive poaching to a home burglary, the social media giant has released a list of names and bios of recently hired employees who previously held roles at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. The poached AI researchers will be part of Meta’s newly formed artificial superintelligence lab that will be led by Alexandr Wang, the co-founder of Scale AI which saw a staggering $14.3 billion investment from Meta last month.
“…thrilled to be accompanied by an incredible group of people joining on the same day. Towards superintelligence,” Wang said in a post on X on Monday, June 30. While Wang shared the list on X, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the artificial superintelligence team in an internal memo to all employees, according to a report by Wired.
Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
Meta has been on a recruiting frenzy over the last few weeks as it looks to staff its 50-member Superintelligence Labs with the most sought-after talent in AI research and development. The big tech company successfully recruited four senior AI researchers from OpenAI, drawing a sharp response from the ChatGPT-maker, which has vowed to compete directly with Meta in the escalating war for AI talent.
“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something. Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by,” Mark Chen, the chief research officer of OpenAI, reportedly said in an internal memo.
While Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang is said to be the chief AI officer of MSL, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will also co-lead the new lab that will focus on AI products and applied AI research.
AI Researchers Joining MSL
Based on Wang’s post on X, here are the following AI researchers joining MSL:
- Trapit Bansal: pioneered RL on chain of thought and cocreator of o-series models at OpenAI.
- Shuchao Bi: cocreator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. Previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAI.
- Huiwen Chang: cocreator of GPT-4o’s image generation, and previously invented MaskIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research.
- ... (and more)
Notably, Wang’s list does not include the names of Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, three researchers who left OpenAI’s Zurich office to join Meta, according to a report by Wall Street Journal.
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