Top Chinese OpenAI researchers join Meta as AI talent war heats up
Meta Platforms, the U.S.-based technology company led by Mark Zuckerberg, has hired four prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researchers from OpenAI, in a move that underscores both the intensifying competition in the global tech industry and the growing international recognition of Chinese talent in AI development, reports a Kazinform News Agency correspondent.
According to a report by The Information, and partially confirmed by Meta’s AI division head Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, the new recruits are Zhao Shengjia, Ren Hongyu, Yu Jiahui and Bi Shuchao. Their move to Meta highlights a strategic effort by the company to strengthen its position in the AI sector, particularly in the development of superintelligent systems.
Wang, writing on social media over the weekend, expressed his enthusiasm for collaborating with the four scientists, stating their joint goal is to advance toward “superintelligence.” Neither Meta nor OpenAI has officially commented on the reports.
The hiring comes amid Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar investments to attract top-tier AI talent. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta has offered bonuses as high as US$100 million to encourage engineers to switch firms. Earlier in June, Meta acquired a 49 percent stake in Scale AI for US$14.2 billion - bringing Wang onboard in the process.
The four scientists share similar academic backgrounds: all completed undergraduate studies at China’s elite institutions before pursuing graduate education and research careers in the United States. Zhao graduated from Tsinghua University in 2016 and later earned a degree in computer science from Stanford University. He joined OpenAI in 2022. Ren, a Peking University graduate, interned at Nvidia, Google, and Apple while completing his studies at Stanford between 2018 and 2023. He is known for his contributions to OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini models, including GPT-4o.
Yu Jiahui studied at the School of the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China, later obtaining a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has served as head of OpenAI’s Perception team since October 2023 and previously worked on the Gemini large language model at DeepMind.
Bi Shuchao, a Zhejiang University alumnus, earned graduate degrees in statistics and mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined OpenAI in May 2024 as head of multimodal post-training, having previously held senior roles at Google.
In a broader recruitment push, Meta also recently brought on Trapit Bansal, another former OpenAI researcher, as well as Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Zhai Xiaohua from OpenAI’s Zurich branch.
Earlier, it was reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched an aggressive recruitment campaign aimed at attracting top artificial intelligence talent to the company’s newly established superintelligence team.