Amid intensifying competition in the AI field, Meta announced early today that it has successfully recruited Trapit Bansal, a top researcher from OpenAI, to join its newly established AI Superintelligence department. According to Techcrunch, an OpenAI spokesperson, Kayla Wood, confirmed Bansal's departure, and his LinkedIn page also shows that he is no longer an employee of OpenAI.
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Trapit Bansal has been working at OpenAI since 2022. He is considered one of the key drivers of reinforcement learning at the company and is also one of the main contributors to OpenAI's first AI reasoning model, o1. His joining is expected to greatly enhance the research capabilities of Meta's AI Superintelligence Lab. The lab is currently led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and is attracting multiple top AI talents, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, Daniel Gross.
In recent months, Meta CEO Zuckerberg has actively recruited talent, offering new AI teams up to a $100 million compensation package to attract top researchers in the industry. Although it is unclear what salary Bansal received at Meta, Zuckerberg has clearly succeeded in attracting outstanding AI research talent.
Along with Bansal, Meta's AI Superintelligence team has also attracted three other former OpenAI researchers: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. At the same time, Jack Rae, a former researcher at Google DeepMind, and Johan Schalkwyk, former head of machine learning at startup Sesame, have also joined the team.
Zuckerberg had also tried to acquire some startups with strong AI research labs, such as Safe Superintelligence, co-founded by former OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Thinking Machines Labs, co-founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murat. However, these negotiations ultimately did not succeed.
AI reasoning models are one of the key challenges for Meta's AI Superintelligence team. In the past year, companies such as OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek have successively launched high-performance AI reasoning models. These models use additional computing resources to improve AI performance in benchmark tests and real-world tasks.
Meta's Superintelligence Lab is expected to become an important part of its social empire, providing AI capabilities for the company's entire product line, similar to Google's DeepMind department. With the addition of key researchers like Bansal, Meta hopes to gain an edge in the AI model race. However, OpenAI plans to release an open-source large AI model in the coming weeks, which may pose a greater challenge to Meta.
Key points:
🌟 Trapit Bansal joins Meta, bringing new momentum to AI reasoning model development.
💰 Zuckerberg offers up to a $100 million compensation package for the new AI team to attract top talent.
🚀 Meta's AI Superintelligence Lab will become a crucial AI support team for the company's product line.
