'Influential researcher' Trapit Bansal among 4 Meta poached from OpenAI. IITian says he's 'thrilled'

Trapit Bansal's arrival is a major coup for Meta. (Image credit: Trapit Bansal/X)

Meta has reportedly secured a significant win in the fiercely competitive AI talent war, poaching highly influential Indian OpenAI researcher to bolster its new AI superintelligence unit. Trapit Bansal is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur who had been a pivotal figure at OpenAI since 2022. On Tuesdaym he took to X to announce his move, declaring: "Thrilled to be joining Meta! Superintelligence is now in sight."

OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed Bansal's departure from the company, with his LinkedIn page indicating he left in June.

A key player joins Meta's ranks
Bansal's arrival is a major coup for Meta. He had been instrumental in kickstarting the OpenAI's work on reinforcement learning alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever, Tech Crunch reported. He is also credited as a foundational contributor to OpenAI’s inaugural AI reasoning model, o1. His expertise is expected to provide a significant boost to Meta's ambitious AI superintelligence lab, which aims to develop a frontier AI reasoning model capable of competing with industry leaders like OpenAI’s o3 or DeepSeek’s R1. Currently, Meta does not offer an AI reasoning model publicly.

Zuckerberg's aggressive recruitment drive
This high-profile hire is part of a broader, aggressive recruitment drive led personally by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg has been directly contacting hundreds of top scientists, researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, offering compensation packages reportedly reaching up to $100 million (approximately Rs 860 crore). This level of personal involvement, including direct messages and private meetings, has surprised many recipients.

Zuckerberg's multi-billion-dollar strategy aims to regain Meta’s footing in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. In one of his boldest moves, he invested $14 billion in AI startup Scale AI, securing a stake and bringing its 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, on board to lead his newly minted AI team.

Bansal is not the only talent Meta has drawn from OpenAI recently. The Wall Street Journal also reported that three other former OpenAI researchers – Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai – have joined Meta’s AI superintelligence team in recent weeks. According to a Bloomberg report, former Google DeepMind researcher Jack Rae and former machine learning leader at the startup Sesame, Johan Schalkwyk, are also among the new recruits, underscoring Meta's concerted effort to assemble a formidable AI powerhouse.