After months of start-up acquisitions and poaching from big tech competitors, Mark Zuckerberg's new artificial intelligence team is ready. The Facebook founder reportedly unveiled the group, which includes 11 high-profile hires from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, on Monday as part of "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL).
Bloomberg and Wired reported on the announcement, citing an internal memo shared by Zuckerberg. “We’re going to call our overall organization Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundation, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models,” he wrote.
This comes after Zuckerberg was accused by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of offering workers up to $100 million in signing bonuses—calling it “crazy” and highlighting the intense battle for top AI talent. Following this, OpenAI began recalibrating its compensation packages.
Who is Part of Meta Superintelligence Labs?
MSL will be led by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI. Zuckerberg described Wang as “the most impressive founder of his generation” and appointed him as Meta’s Chief AI Officer.
Last month, Meta invested approximately $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, valuing the company at nearly $29 billion. Scale AI provides high-quality data labeling, model evaluation, and reinforcement learning tools critical to building advanced AI systems. The deal gives Meta access to top-tier data infrastructure, strengthening its efforts to scale up its Llama models and compete in the AI superintelligence race.
Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, will work alongside Wang and lead Meta’s applied AI research and product development.
Other new hires include Trapit Bansal and Shuchao Bi (co-creators of GPT-4o and the o-series), Huiwen Chang (image generation expert from Google), and Ji Lin (a developer of multiple GPT models). The team also includes Joel Pobar, Jack Rae, and Pei Sun, who bring deep expertise in inference systems, LLM pre-training, and perception models.
Additional high-profile hires include Johan Schalkwyk (former Google Fellow and early contributor to Sesame), Jiahui Yu (co-creator of 03, 04-mini, GPT-4.1, and GPT-4o), and Shengjia Zhao (co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and all mini models including 4.1 and 03).
