Meta Hires Four OpenAI Researchers For New Unit

Meta poaches four more prominent OpenAI researchers to join new superintelligence unit headed by Alexandr Wang

By Matthew Broersma,
2 min
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Facebook parent Meta Platforms hired four notable AI researchers from OpenAI on Friday, according to media reports, as the company ramps up efforts to compete in generative artificial intelligence against other large tech firms.

The hiring of Zhao Shengjia, Ren Hongyu, Yu Jiahui and Bi Shuchao also highlights the role of expertise from Chinese-origin researchers in the field.

The four are to work under Alexandr Wang, former chief executive of AI data tagging start-up Scale AI, who is heading a new “superintelligence” unit at Meta, according to reports.

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AI skills

Wang said in a social media post that he looked forward to working with the researchers “toward superintelligence”, the concept of AI that is more intelligent than any human mind.

Other AI leaders including Daniel Gros and Nat Friedman are to work with the unit.

Meta and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meta formed the superintelligence unit after hiring Wang away from Scale AI and acquiring 49 percent of Scale AI for a massive $14.3 billion (£10.3bn) in June, another move highlighting the Meta’s efforts to catch up to rivals in the AI field.

All four of the former OpenAI researchers studied at prestigious Chinese universities before pursuing further degrees at prominent institutions in the US, according to their LinkedIn profiles and social media accounts.

Zhao joined OpenAI in 2022, while Ren worked on OpenAI’s o3-mini, o1-mini, o1 and GPT-4o.

Hiring spree

Yu has been head of OpenAI’s Perception team since October 2023 and previously worked at Google AI subsidiary DeepMind and co-led projects related to Google’s AI model Gemini.

Bi joined OpenAI in May 2024 as head of multimodal post-training, a method for improving chatbot output, after working at Google from 2013 to 2019.

Earlier in June Meta hired former OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal to the superintelligence team and hired researchers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Zhai Xiaohua from OpenAI’s Zurich office.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said recently that Meta has offered hiring bonuses of up to $100m to poach engineers from his company.