Meta hires top OpenAI researcher for AI superintelligence push
Trapit Bansal, co-creator of OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, now joins Meta alongside other top AI experts from DeepMind and OpenAI Zurich.
Meta has reportedly hired AI researcher Trapit Bansal, who previously worked closely with OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever on reinforcement learning and co-created the o1 reasoning model.
Bansal joins Meta’s ambitious superintelligence team, which is focused on further pushing AI reasoning capabilities.
Former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang leads the new team, brought in after Meta invested $14.3 billion in the AI data labelling company.
Alongside Bansal, several other notable figures have recently joined, including three OpenAI researchers from Zurich, a former Google DeepMind expert, Jack Rae, and a senior machine learning lead from Sesame AI.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is accelerating AI recruitment by negotiating with prominent names like former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Gross.
Despite these aggressive efforts, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that even $100 million joining bonuses have failed to lure key staff away from his firm.
Zuckerberg has also explored acquiring startups such as Sutskever’s Safe SuperIntelligence and Perplexity AI, further highlighting Meta’s urgency in catching up in the generative AI race.
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