Meet the 'superintelligence' team Zuckerberg has assembled to beat OpenAI
What's the story
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new "superintelligence" team within the company to drive its AI ambitions. The announcement was made via an internal memo shared on Monday. The memo detailed the names and backgrounds of the newly hired employees, most of whom have come from rival AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Chief AI Officer
Alexandr Wang to head the new Superintelligence Labs
As part of its aggressive recruitment strategy, Meta has invested a whopping $14.3 billion in Scale AI and appointed its CEO Alexandr Wang to head the new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). In his memo, Zuckerberg said, "Alex and I have worked together for several years, and I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation. He has a clear sense of the historic importance of superintelligence."
Leadership positions
GitHub's Nat Friedman joins as co-lead for the new lab
Zuckerberg introduced Wang as the company's "Chief AI Officer." He also announced former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman as a co-leader for the new lab with Wang. "He ran GitHub at Microsoft, and most recently has run one of the leading AI investment firms. Nat has served on our Meta Advisory Group for the last year, so he already has a good sense of our roadmap and what we need to do," wrote Zuckerberg in the memo.
Team expansion
Of the 10 new hires, 7 are from OpenAI
The memo also revealed a list of new hires for the superintelligence team. Trapit Bansal pioneered reinforcement learning on chain of thought and co-creator of o-series models at OpenAI. Shuchao Bi is the co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. He has also led multimodal post-training at OpenAI. Huiwen Chang: Co-creator of GPT-4o's image generation, and previously invented MaskGIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google. Ji Lin helped build OpenAI's o3/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, o4-imagegen, and Operator reasoning stack.
Future prospects
Team also includes researchers from Google and Anthropic
Joel Pobar led inference at Anthropic. Hongyu Ren is the co-creator of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o3, and o4-mini. Johan Schalkwyk, a former Google Fellow, was an early contributor to Sesame and the technical lead for Maya. Pei Sun worked on post-training, coding, and reasoning for Gemini at Google DeepMind. He also developed the last two generations of Waymo's perception models. AI researchers Jiahui Yu and Shengjia Zhao—both of whom previously worked at OpenAI—round out the team.