Who is part of Meta's AI ‘dream team'? Full list of researchers poached from OpenAI, Google DeepMind
The poached AI researchers will be part of Meta's newly formed artificial superintelligence lab that will be led by Alexandr Wang, the co-founder of Scale AI which saw a staggering $14.3 billion investment from Meta last month.
'…thrilled to be accompanied by an incredible group of people joining on the same day. Towards superintelligence,' Wang said in a post on X on Monday, June 30. While Wang shared the list on X, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the artificial superintelligence team in an internal memo to all employees, according to a report by Wired.
'We're going to call our overall organisation 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 was quoted as saying in the report.
Meta has been on a recruiting frenzy over the last few weeks as it looks to staff its 50-member Superintelligence Labs with the most sought-after talent in AI research and development. The big tech company successfully recruited four senior AI researchers from OpenAI, drawing a sharp response from the ChatGPT-maker, which has vowed to compete directly with Meta in the escalating war for AI talent.
'I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something. Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by,' Mark Chen, the chief research officer of OpenAI, reportedly said in an internal memo.
While Scale AI's Alexandr Wang is said to be the chief AI officer of MSL, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will also co-lead the new lab that will focus on AI products and applied AI research.
Besides Wang and Friedman, here are the following AI researchers joining MSL, as per Wang's post on X:
-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-4o. 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.
I'm excited to be the Chief AI Officer of @Meta, working alongside @natfriedman, and thrilled to be accompanied by an incredible group of people joining on the same day.
Towards superintelligence 🚀 pic.twitter.com/2ACj1lKN9Q
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) July 1, 2025
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Notably, Wang's list does not include the names of Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, three researchers who left OpenAI's Zurich office to join Meta, according to a report by Wall Street Journal.
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