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Zuckerberg Poached Long List of Top AI Talent for Meta
By Reuters | 08 Jul, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg's crusade to elevate quickly Meta's AI capabilities to match those of top tech giants has resulted in a long list of Silicon Valley's top AI talent.

Meta Platforms is racing to secure top artificial intelligence talent for its newly created Superintelligence Labs to better compete with rivals including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

The Facebook and Instagram parent's aggressive hiring for its unified AI initiative has intensified the talent war in Silicon Valley. 

It also follows senior staff departures and a poor reception for Meta's latest open-source Llama 4 model, challenges that have allowed Google, OpenAI and China's DeepSeek to seize momentum in the AI race.

In June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them.

Here is a list of the new recruits at Meta: ALEXANDR WANG

Meta hired the former Scale AI CEO to head the new division as chief AI officer, according to a memo reviewed by Reuters.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also hired some Scale AI staff after the company invested $14.3 billion in the data-labeling startup.

NAT FRIEDMAN

The former GitHub CEO will co-lead the unit with Wang and head the company's work on AI products and applied research.

Friedman co-founded venture capital firm NFDG, which has backed high-profile startups including Safe Superintelligence, Perplexity and Figma.

DANIEL GROSS 

The former CEO of AI startup Safe Superintelligence has joined the team to lead the AI products division, sources told Reuters.

Gross had co-founded NFDG.

RUOMING PANG

Pang was the head of Apple's Foundation Models team and responsible for advanced AI features, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

He joined Meta with a multi-million-dollar compensation package, according to Bloomberg News. 

TRAPIT BANSAL

The AI researcher joined OpenAI in 2022, where he played a key role in developing the "o-series" reasoning models.

Bansal has directly worked with OpenAI and Safe Superintelligence co-founder Ilya Sutskever, according to his LinkedIn page.

SHUCHAO BI

Bi joined OpenAI in 2024 after working for over 10 years at YouTube and Google. 

He co-founded YouTube Shorts and built multi-stage deep learning models to optimize Google Ads performance, according to his LinkedIn page.

HUIWEN CHANG

Chang joined OpenAI in 2023 after working as a Research Scientist at Google for more than four years, according to her LinkedIn page.

She is a co-creator of GPT-4o, OpenAI's multimodal model, and invented MaskGIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research.

JI LIN

Lin joined OpenAI in 2023, where he contributed to building advanced multimodal reasoning systems and Operator reasoning stack, OpenAI's computer-using agent architecture.

JOEL POBAR

Pobar joined Anthropic in 2023, where he oversaw infrastructure and inference pipelines for large language models. He also worked at Meta for about 11 years.

JACK RAE

Rae was a pre‑training technical lead for Google DeepMind's Gemini and spearheaded the reasoning development for Gemini 2.5.

HONGYU REN 

Ren joined OpenAI in 2023, co-creating multiple o‑series and GPT‑4o models. He helped lead post-training efforts for the ChatGPT maker's most advanced reasoning models.

JOHAN SCHALKWYK

Schalkwyk was a former Google Fellow and oversaw major research and product integrations in speech AI.

He has joined Meta Superintelligence Labs as a Voice Lead, according to his LinkedIn page.

PEI SUN

Sun worked on post-training, coding and reasoning for Gemini at Google DeepMind. He previously created the last two generations of self-driving unit Waymo's perception models.

JIAHUI YU

Yu joined OpenAI in 2023. Previously, he led the perception team at the AI startup. He co-created o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o models.

SHENGJIA ZHAO

Zhao worked as a research scientist at OpenAI. He co-created ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models, 4.1 and o3.

(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese, Jaspreet Singh and Kritika Lamba in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas)

Ren joined OpenAI in 2023, co-creating multiple o‑series and GPT‑4o models. He helped lead post-training efforts for the ChatGPT maker's most advanced reasoning models.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech during the Meta Connect annual event, at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S. September 25, 2024. REUTERS/Manuel Orbegozo/File Photo

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