Meta has employed a extremely influential OpenAI researcher, Trapit Bansal, to work on its AI reasoning fashions below the corporate’s new AI superintelligence unit, an individual conversant in the matter tells iinfoai.
OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wooden confirmed to iinfoai that Bansal had departed OpenAI. Bansal’s LinkedIn web page says that he left OpenAI in June.
Bansal has labored at OpenAI since 2022 and was a key participant in kickstarting the corporate’s work on reinforcement studying alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever. He’s listed as a foundational contributor on OpenAI’s first AI reasoning mannequin, o1.
Bansal might provide a major elevate to Meta’s AI superintelligence lab, which additionally options leaders comparable to former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and is wanting so as to add former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Secure Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Gross. Bansal might assist Meta develop a frontier AI reasoning mannequin that’s aggressive with industry-leading expertise, comparable to OpenAI’s o3 or DeepSeek’s R1. Presently, Meta doesn’t provide an AI reasoning mannequin publicly.
In current months, Mark Zuckerberg has been on a hiring spree to construct out Meta’s new AI staff, providing $100 million compensation packages to prime researchers who be a part of his firm. It’s unclear what Bansal was provided to hitch on this deal.
Nonetheless, it appears that evidently Zuckerberg has been profitable at nabbing prime AI analysis expertise.
Three different former OpenAI researchers — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — have additionally joined Meta’s AI superintelligence staff in current weeks, The Wall Avenue Journal reported on Wednesday. Bansal will be a part of them, alongside former Google DeepMind researcher Jack Rae and former machine studying chief on the startup Sesame, Johan Schalkwyk, in keeping with Bloomberg.
To additional fill out its new AI unit, Zuckerberg reportedly tried to accumulate startups with heavy-hitting AI analysis labs, comparable to Sutskever’s Secure Superintelligence, Mira Murati’s Pondering Machines Labs, and Perplexity. Nonetheless, these talks by no means progressed to a last stage.
On a current podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned Meta has been making an attempt to poach his startup’s prime expertise, however claimed that “none of our greatest individuals have determined to take him up on that.”
A Meta spokesperson declined to remark.
AI reasoning fashions current a key space for Meta’s AI superintelligence staff to get proper. Within the final 12 months, OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek have shipped extremely performant AI reasoning fashions which have pushed the bounds of what software program can do. By coaching AI fashions to work by way of issues earlier than giving a solution, utilizing further time and computing sources to take action, AI labs have discovered success in bettering AI’s efficiency on benchmarks and real-world duties.
Meta’s AI superintelligence lab might turn into a key inner group that powers merchandise all through the corporate, very similar to Google’s DeepMind unit. Meta has an formidable effort to construct AI brokers for enterprise below the previous Salesforce CEO of AI, Clara Shih. In an effort to construct aggressive brokers, Meta must develop frontier AI reasoning fashions to energy them.
With the addition of Bansal and different key AI researchers, Meta hopes to drag forward within the AI race. Which may be troublesome on condition that OpenAI plans to launch an open AI reasoning mannequin within the coming weeks — an providing that might add much more strain on Meta’s open AI choices.
This story was up to date after publication with extra particulars.
