Meta's recruiting blitz scores major AI talent for its "superintelligence" effort

Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive AI talent acquisition strategy is paying dividends, with Meta successfully poaching key researchers from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. In recent days, details have emerged about Meta's hiring spree: from the initial report that the company had hired Trapit Bansal, an influential researcher credited with spearheading reinforcement learning on chains of thought alongside Ilya Sutskever and recognized as a key contributor in OpenAI's reasoning model series, to a memo by Mark Zuckerberg introducing Meta's new hires.

In addition to luring Bansal, the social media giant has landed three prominent researchers—Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai—who previously established OpenAI's Zurich office. Reports that Meta had poached these three researchers from Meta delved into some specifics of Zuckerberg's widely reported recruiting campaign, like the fact that he was personally reaching out to hundreds of AI researchers via WhatsApp and offering attractive multi-million-dollar compensation packages.

A memo first obtained by WIRED reveals that Meta has now formalized these efforts under "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL), with Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang joining as chief AI officer following a $14.3 billion investment. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-lead the new division focusing on next-generation AI models. In addition to the names mentioned above, the memo confirms that Meta's hiring spree has netted impressive talent, including other OpenAI researchers and talent from Google DeepMind and Anthropic.

Despite the impressive number of researchers Meta has welcomed in recent weeks, the company's hiring strategy has not been without its challenges. According to reports, Meta unsuccessfully pursued OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman. Moreover, talks to acquire research-heavy startups Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Labs, and Perplexity did not reach the final stages.