By Jason Nelson
4 min read
The war for artificial intelligence supremacy is no longer fought in code alone; it’s now a fight over talent, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just pulled off a major heist, poaching talent from rivals OpenAI and Google.
Zuckerberg revealed the new AI researcher dream team today, which he called the Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Many of the new team members were lured away from rival firms, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.
The team is led by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, who now serves as Meta’s Chief AI Officer. He co-leads the division with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who oversees AI product development and applied research.
“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way.”
Meta’s aggressive recruitment of AI researchers from rival firms has sparked outrage at OpenAI, prompting an internal memo from OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, who described the poaching as akin to someone “breaking into our home and stealing something,” according to a report by Wired.
“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote. “Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.”
To that end, the company reportedly gave OpenAI employees the week off to recover from the frenzy of rumors surrounding the talent war.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously claimed that Meta had been luring his top scientists via $100 million signing bonuses—a figure Meta disputes.
The fallout became public last week, when OpenAI confirmed that researchers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai had left the company. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta hired all three scientists, who had previously worked together at Google DeepMind.
OpenAI is now working to prevent further departures. Chen said the company is “recalibrating compensation” and collaborating with leadership “around the clock” to retain employees.
He also accused Meta of stoking a fear of missing out by offering “exploding” bonuses that require quick decisions. Chen encouraged staff to reach out for support if they felt pressured by recruiters during a scheduled companywide “recharge” week.
Zuckerberg’s memo today says that Meta is consolidating its AI efforts under the MSL umbrella, bringing together its foundational model teams, product applications, the FAIR research group, and a new lab focused on developing next-generation AI models.
“I've spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We're still forming this group, and we'll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well.”
“I'm optimistic that this new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone,” he added.
Still, Chen tried to reframe the battle as a distraction. “The skirmishes with Meta are the side quest,” he wrote. “The real prize is general intelligence.”
But if the battle is a side quest, it could redraw the map. The best minds in AI are no longer tethered to ideology or loyalty—they’re following the money, the compute, and increasingly, the chance to define the future.
Meta’s new team includes Daniel Gross, co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence (SSI); former DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun; and several high-profile AI researchers from OpenAI, including Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren, as well as Joel Pobar, an Anthropic engineer and Meta veteran, and Google Fellow, Johan Schalkwyk.
Meta’s stock rose 0.47% on Monday following the news of its AI hiring blitz, trading at $736.83, according to MarketWatch data.
Meta and OpenAI did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair and Josh Quittner
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