Meta unveiled its most ambitious Artificial Intelligence team: who is part of it

A team with experience

The new hires have worked on key projects such as GPT-4o, Gemini, and Waymo, and have participated in pioneering developments in conversational, visual, and reasoning AI.

Meta seeks to take the lead in the race for artificial superintelligence, and with this roster, it takes a strong step to compete against Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Wang and Friedman, the public faces of the new laboratory

Alexandr Wang assumes the role of Chief AI Officer at Meta and will lead the initiative alongside Nat Friedman. The latter will focus on product application and applied research.

Both will work together to accelerate the arrival of more powerful models, both for internal use and for the general market.

Meta doubled down on artificial intelligence and unveiled its new division: Meta Superintelligence Labs. The announcement was accompanied by a list of prominent names who have worked at giants such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Mark Zuckerberg informed his team that the new laboratory will be led by Alexandr Wang (CEO of Scale AI) and by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The goal: to develop the most advanced AI models on the market.

A hiring offensive

Meta has been recruiting talent from rival companies for months. According to reports, it invested more than USD 14,000 million in Scale AI and has now officially introduced its new star team.

It will bring together the foundation models, product, and FAIR (Facebook AI Research) teams, along with a unit dedicated to the next generation of models.

Who makes up Meta Superintelligence Labs

The list includes some of the most prominent names in the industry:

• Trapit Bansal: pioneer in chain-of-thought reasoning (RL CoT) and co-creator of the O-series models at OpenAI.
• Shuchao Bi: co-creator of the voice mode for GPT-4o and o4-mini. He led multimodal post-training at OpenAI.
• Huiwen Chang: worked on image generation for GPT-4o. She created the MaskIT and Muse architectures at Google Research.
• Ji Lin: contributed to the development of o3, o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, 4.5, imagegen, and the Operator reasoning stack.
• Joel Pobar: former Anthropic and former Meta. With 11 years at the company, he worked on HHVM, Hack, and machine learning.
• Jack Rae: pre-training lead for Gemini and Gemini 2.5. He worked on Gopher and Chinchilla at DeepMind.
• Hongyu Ren: co-creator of GPT-4o, o3-mini, o1-mini, and o4-mini. He led post-training at OpenAI.
• Johan Schalkwyk: former Google Fellow. He participated in Sesame and was the technical lead for the Maya project.
• Pei Sun: worked on Gemini and developed perception models for Waymo.
• Jiahui Yu: co-creator of GPT-4.1 and 4o. He led the perception team at OpenAI and co-piloted the multimodal area of Gemini.
• Shengjia Zhao: co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and all mini versions. He led the development of synthetic data at OpenAI.