Zuckerberg Unveils Meta AI Team from OpenAI, Google with Alexandr Wang

On June 30, Mark Zuckerberg sent an internal memo to all Meta employees, announcing the establishment of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) - a new organization that includes the entire platform team, product team, FAIR research team and a new generation AI lab. Notably, the list of newly recruited members this time brings together a series of faces who have held key roles at leading companies such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic.

Mark Zuckerberg announces revamped Superintelligence Labs unit. (Source: Reuters)

Meta also confirmed that Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI – a company in which Meta has invested $14.3 billion – will take on the role of Chief AI Officer and head of MSL. Joining Wang is Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, who will co-lead the lab and focus on developing practical AI products.

The list of new personnel announced by Mark Zuckerberg includes:

Trapit Bansal: Pioneer in chained reinforcement learning, co-creator of o-series models at OpenAI.
Shuchao Bi: Co-creator of GPT-4o and o4-mini speech modes, former multimodal post-training lead at OpenAI.
Huiwen Chang: Co-creator of GPT-4o image generation, developed MaskIT and Muse at Google Research.
Ji Lin: Played a role in building GPT-4o, GPT-4.1/4.5, 03/o4-mini, and the Operator inference system.
Joel Pobar: Inference Specialist at Anthropic; spent 11 years at Meta working on various programming tools.
Jack Rae: Head of pre-training and reasoning engineering for Gemini; led LLM projects at DeepMind such as Gopher and Chinchilla.
Hongyu Ren: Co-creator of GPT-4o, 03, o4-mini models; former post-training lead at OpenAI.
Johan Schalkwyk: Former Google senior expert, lead engineer on the Maya project.
Pei Sun: Head of post-training and inference programming for Gemini at DeepMind; built cognitive models for Waymo.
Jiahui Yu: Former perception team leader at OpenAI, co-creator of GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o4-mini.
Shengjia Zhao: Co-creator of ChatGPT and GPT-4, former head of data synthesis at OpenAI.

Meta's official launch of MSL, led by two big names - Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman - not only marks a strategic move to close the gap with rivals like OpenAI or Google DeepMind, but could also reshape the game in the artificial superintelligence (AGI) race.

Former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang has joined Meta. (Source: Reuters)

It is not difficult to see that the list of personnel Meta recruited is not simply excellent engineers or researchers, but the "intelligence architects" behind many core breakthroughs such as: chained reasoning ability, multimodal image and voice creation, optimal small-size language models... Gathering individuals who designed GPT-4, Gemini 2.5, or the Waymo cognitive system not only shows Meta's attraction, but also shows that they want to build a solid foundation to develop an AI model with the ability to think almost like a human.

The concept of AGI – artificial general intelligence – is still theoretical, but steps like Meta’s are making it more feasible. When the people who built the foundations for ChatGPT, Gemini, and other advanced reasoning systems come together in the same lab, the question is no longer “if”, but “when”.

If Meta succeeds in delivering a model that surpasses the capabilities of its current competitors, product ecosystems like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, or Quest could be augmented by unprecedentedly intelligent AI agents, transforming the experience of hundreds of millions of global users.

Minh Hoan

Source: https://vtcnews.vn/zuckerberg-he-lo-doi-ngu-sieu-ai-meta-tu-openai-google-voi-alexandr-wang-ar952002.html