AI Poaching Spree: Meta’s Product Lead Chaya Nayak Leaves for OpenAI, Joins Special Initiatives Team

Chaya Nayak, Meta’s director of product management for generative AI, has left the company after nearly nine years to join OpenAI’s special initiatives team, the executive announced on LinkedIn. Nayak said the move represents the “perfect next chapter” in her career and that she will work closely with Irina Kofman on experimental and strategic projects at the AI startup.

Nayak’s departure removes a senior product figure from Meta’s AI ranks at a time when the company has been reshuffling leadership inside its Superintelligence Lab.

She began her Meta career leading the Data for Good programme and later built and ran the Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) team, where she helped develop privacy-preserving data frameworks such as clean rooms and differential-privacy tooling to enable independent study of Meta’s societal impacts.

In recent years she steered Meta’s generative-AI product work, including contributions across three iterations of the company’s Llama models and the rollout of Meta AI features.

Talent Flow to OpenAI

Nayak is the latest in a string of senior Meta researchers and executives to depart for OpenAI and other competitors, a pattern industry observers say underlines OpenAI’s magnetic pull for top AI talent.

Meta has publicly reorganised its AI efforts under a Superintelligence Lab, but departures like Nayak’s raise fresh questions about the social-media giant’s ability to retain leaders amid fierce competition for researchers and product managers who can ship large-scale generative systems.

At OpenAI, Nayak will join a small, forward-looking group focused on experimental work beyond the company’s core consumer products. Her background in transparency, data governance and large-model productisation positions her to contribute to OpenAI’s strategic explorations around governance, safety and novel product pathways — areas the startup has signalled are central to longer-term plans. The move suggests OpenAI values product leaders with experience navigating both technical and policy-facing challenges.

Nayak’s Professional Arc

Nayak chronicled her tenure at Meta as formative: she credited the company with career-defining opportunities that ranged from building teams and products to publishing research on democracy and platform effects.

Before Meta, her résumé included roles in data science, public-policy research and product work; she holds advanced training in public policy and data science and has collaborated with academic researchers on peer-reviewed studies.

Senior departures from major AI investors and builders are closely watched because they can shift where foundational research and product expertise congregate.

For Meta, Nayak’s exit represents both a personnel loss and a signal that talent competition remains fierce; for OpenAI, it adds a leader with deep product-and-policy experience precisely as the company broadens its remit beyond chat and toward governance and experimental systems.

Industry watchers will track whether Nayak’s move is followed by further senior exits from Meta, how quickly she begins to influence OpenAI’s long-range projects, and whether her experience in transparency and data frameworks shapes OpenAI’s approach to responsible deployment.

For now, Nayak said she is “excited to pour everything I’ve learned into work that will help define what comes next for technology and society.”