Mark Zuckerberg notified Meta staff today to introduce them to the new superintelligence team. The memo, which WIRED obtained, lists names and bios for the recently hired employees, many of whom came from rival AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Over the past few months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a recruiting frenzy to poach some of the most sought-after talent in AI. The social media giant has invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired Alexandr Wang, its CEO, to run Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. News of the memo was first reported by Bloomberg.
“We’re going to call our overall organization Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models,” Zuckerberg wrote in the memo on Monday. Meta declined to comment.
Zuckerberg introduced Wang, who will be the company’s “chief AI officer” and leader of MSL, as well as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Friedman will colead the new lab with Wang, with a focus on AI products and applied research.
Here’s the list of all the new hires as seen in Zuckerberg’s memo. It notably doesn’t include the employees who joined from OpenAI’s Zurich office.
- Trapit Bansal: pioneered RL on chain of thought and cocreator of o-series models at OpenAl.
- Shuchao Bi: cocreator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. Previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAl.
- Huiwen Chang: cocreator of GPT-4o’s image generation, and previously invented MaskIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research.
- Ji Lin: helped build 03/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, 40-imagegen, and Operator reasoning stack.
- Joel Pobar: inference at Anthropic. Previously at Meta for 11 years on HHVM, Hack, Flow, Redex, performance tooling, and machine learning.
- Jack Rae: pre-training tech lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2.5. Led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind.
- Hongyu Ren: cocreator of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, 03 and o4-mini. Previously leading a group for post-training at OpenAl.
- Johan Schalkwyk: former Google Fellow, early contributor to Sesame, and technical lead for Maya.
- Pei Sun: post-training, coding, and reasoning for Gemini at Google Deepmind. Previously created the last two generations of Waymo’s perception models.
- Jiahui Yu: cocreator of 03, 04-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-40. Previously led the perception team at OpenAl, and co-led multimodal at Gemini.
- Shengjia Zhao: cocreator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models, 4.1 and 03. Previously led synthetic data at OpenAl.
