Latest news with #MaskIT
India Today
3 days ago
- Business
- India Today
Immigrants powering US AI push: From Bansal to Chang, Zuckerberg's top AI team is full of immigrants
As the AI arms race between Silicon Valley giants intensifies, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is upping the ante with a bold new move — the creation of a brand-new SuperIntelligence Lab and a star-studded lineup of hires to go with it. In what can only be described as a talent heist, Meta has hired 11 of the brightest minds in AI, poaching top talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and beyond. Each new recruit brings high-end expertise to the table, from multimodal systems to LLM safety. But it is interesting to see how none of them hold a bachelor's degree from the United other words, Meta's SuperIntelligence Lab team — and in general almost entirety of the US AI push — is powered by immigrants, the same people who are currently on the radar of the Donald Trump administration. So, who are these people? Let's meet Meta's newest brain trust:Trapit BansalBefore joining the Meta team, Trapit Bansal was one of the OpenAI brains. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur, he holds integrated degrees in mathematics and statistics, followed by a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts where he focused on meta-learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. His professional journey blends strong academic foundations with practical experience at some of the world's leading tech Bi Shuchao Bi, formerly of OpenAI, brings his multimodal magic to Meta's SuperIntelligence Lab. A top expert in blending speech and text, Bi played a key role in developing GPT-4o's voice mode and the compact yet powerful o4-mini model. His work bridges the gap between how humans communicate and how AI understands, making digital assistants more fluid, natural, and versatile than ever. From boosting conversational AI to shaping the future of human-machine interaction, Bi's expertise is set to be a game-changer for Meta's AI ChangPreviously at Google Research, Chang, is a known generative image wizard. She helped design the Muse and MaskIT architectures, the secret sauce behind many AI-generated visuals today. She studied at Tsinghua University in China, and then in Princeton. She also led the image generation work for LinLin is another OpenAI talent who is a Tsinghua and MIT alumnus. He was instrumental in scaling LLMs like GPT-4o. His work has made high-quality AI image generation more efficient and cost-effective — a major win for large-scale PobarAfter earning his degree in Australia, Joel Pobar carved out a name for himself as a seasoned infrastructure expert with more than a decade of experience in building scalable AI systems. His work on industry-defining projects like HHVM, Hack, and PyTorch has made him a key player behind the scenes of modern AI. Jack RaeA former employee at Google DeepMind, Rae has a reputation as a language model heavyweight. He's been involved in pre-training major models like Gemini 2.5, Gopher and Chinchilla. With degrees from Bristol, CMU, and UCL, he brings a unique cross-Atlantic academic RenRen, a Stanford PhD and Peking University grad, worked on post-training GPT-4o and its smaller variants. His research is focused on improving AI reliability, making models safer, more robust, and generally less prone to hallucinations. He is the fourth ex-OpenAI SchalkwykadvertisementA former Googler and a South African speech recognition expert, Schalkwyk helped lead the Maya team and contributed to the early days of the Sesame project. He's now bringing his voice tech expertise to Meta's AI SunSun's dual degrees from Tsinghua and CMU power his work in post-training advanced AI models. He's also built perception systems for Waymo's autonomous vehicles, giving him a rare edge in real-world AI deployment. He quit Google DeepMind to come onboard with Meta. Jiahuai YuA multimodal maverick, Yu has contributed to a range of powerful models like o3/4o-mini and GPT-4. With degrees from USTC and UIUC, his work lets AI systems understand and reason across text, images and ZhaoZhao is the co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and o4-mini. A leader in data synthesis and AI safety, Zhao's research continues to shape how modern AI models learn and behave responsibly.- Ends
Mint
4 days ago
- Business
- Mint
Who are the 11 AI experts hired by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta? Fun fact — all of them are immigrants
In a bid to push AI amid rising demand, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reorganised the company's structure, hiring 11 top AI researchers for its brand-new SuperIntelligence Lab. 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 ( 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.
Indian Express
6 days ago
- Business
- Indian Express
Who is part of Meta's AI ‘dream team'? Full list of researchers poached from OpenAI, Google DeepMind
Days after OpenAI's chief researcher likened Meta's aggressive poaching to a home burglary, the social media giant has released a list of names and bios of recently hired employees who previously held roles at OpenAI, Anthropic, and 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 🚀 — Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) July 1, 2025 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.
