Who are the 11 AI experts hired by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta? Fun fact — all of them are immigrants
Zuckerberg has brought on 11 new hires in the AI field, including researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, according to multiple reports, as the AI war between tech companies intensifies.
While the 11 new AI experts are from different companies, they have one thing in common — none of them have their bachelor's degree from the US and are immigrants.
Worked previously at OpenAI
Education: Master of Science (M.Sc. Integrated), Mathematics & Statistics, IIT Kanpur; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
About: Trapit Bansal is credited with his groundbreaking research on AI, which helps AI models improve logical step-by-step problem solving abilities. His industrial work is cited widely and has affected both industrial and academic AI models.
Worked previously at OpenAI
Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), Zhejiang University, China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of California, Berkeley, USA
About: Shuchao Bi is a well-known name in the multimodal AI field, and has co-developed the voice mode for GPT-4o and the o4-mini model. His work has been key to the advancements in conversational AI.
Worked previously at Google Research
Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), Tsinghua University, China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Princeton University, USA
About: Huiwen Chang is the bran behind MaskIT and Muse architectures, which have become the foundational models in creating generative AI images. She led the GPT-4o image generation team.
Worked previously at OpenAI
Education: Bachelor of Engineering (BEng), Tsinghua University, China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
About: Ji Ling played a crucial part in optimising and scaling large language models such as GPT-4o and the o4 group. His work has led AI images being more cost-effective.
Worked previously at Anthropic and Meta
Education: Bachelor of Information Technology (Honours), Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia
About: Joel Pobar has over a decade of experience in building scalable AI models. A part of technologies like HHVM, Hack, and PyTorch, his work enables AI models run efficiently at scale.
Worked previously at Google DeepMind
Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), University of Bristol, UK; Master of Science (MS), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University College London (UCL), UK
About: Jack Rae is a leader in large-scale language model research. He has pre-trained Gemini 2.5, and has developed Google's Gopher and Chinchilla models.
Worked previously at OpenAI
Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), Peking University, China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Stanford University, USA
About: Hongy Ren is credited with the post-training of GPT-4o and the o1/3/4o-mini models to increase reliability and robustness. His research focuses on making AI safer and trustworthy.
Worked previously at Google
Education: Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BS Meng), University of Pretoria, South Africa
About: A Google fellow and speech recognition expert, Johan Schalkwyk has led the Maya team and contributed to the Sesame project of Google in its early days.
Worked previously at Google DeepMind
Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), Tsinghua University, China; Master of Science (MS), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA
About: Pei Sun's research concerns the post-training of advanced AI models as well as their reasoning. He has also developed the perception systems for Waymo's self-driving cars.
Worked previously at OpenAI and Gemini
Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA
About: Jiahuai Yu's work focuses on perception and multimodal AI, having been associated with o3/4o-mini and GPT-4/4o. His research enables AI models to generate information from texts, images and more.
Worked previously at OpenAI
Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), Tsinghua University, China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Stanford University, USA
About: Shengjia Zhao is the co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and o4-mini, and is a lead researcher of data synthesis and AI safety.
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