OpenAI Loses 4 Key Researchers to Meta

Mark Zuckerberg has been working to poach talent from rival labs for his new superintelligence team.
Image may contain Light Adult Person Electronics Mobile Phone and Phone
Photograph: PAU BARRENA/Getty Images

Four OpenAI researchers are leaving the company to go to Meta, two sources confirm to WIRED.

Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren have joined Meta’s superintelligence team. Their OpenAI Slack profiles have been deactivated. The Information first reported on the departures.

It’s the latest in a series of aggressive moves by Mark Zuckerberg, who is racing to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in building artificial general intelligence.

Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a podcast that Meta has been making “giant offers” to OpenAI staffers with “$100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp per year.” He added that “none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” On Monday, Zuckerberg confirmed the moves in a memo to staff introducing the superintelligence team.

“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, said in a memo over the weekend. “Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.”

Hongyu Ren was OpenAI’s post-training lead for the o3 and o4 mini models, along with the open source model that’s set to be released this summer, sources say. Post-training is the process of refining a model after it has been trained on a primary dataset.

Got a Tip?
Are you a current or former OpenAI or Meta employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at kylie.01.

Jiahui Yu did a stint at Google DeepMind before joining OpenAI in late 2023. Zuckerberg says in the memo that Yu is the “cocreator of o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o” as well as the previous lead of OpenAI’s perception team, and former coleader of “multimodal at Gemini.” Shuchao Bi was a manager of OpenAI’s multimodal models, and Zuckerberg’s memo says Bi is the “cocreator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini.”

Multiple sources at OpenAI tell WIRED the four most recent departures were a major loss for the company, as the group was considered a key part of the research strategy. The departures from OpenAI come shortly after the company lost three researchers from its Zurich office, also to Meta, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Meta’s Superintelligence Lab is finally starting to take shape. In a the memo introducing the team, Zuckerberg announced that Alexandr Wang will be the company’s “chief AI officer” and leader of the Meta Superintelligence Lab, along with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. OpenAI and Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.