Meet the 11 AI experts Meta hired for its Superintelligence team to take on OpenAI and Google

Meta

The AI war just got a lot more serious. After weeks of buzz around Meta poaching top AI minds from rivals, the company has now revealed exactly who’s joining its brand-new SuperIntelligence Lab, in a memo that was obtained by Wired.

This is Meta’s boldest step yet in its mission to build artificial superintelligence. Leading the charge is Alexandr Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, who recently landed a jaw-dropping $14.3 billion investment from Meta. Wang shared the full lineup of his team on X, calling it an “incredible group” heading towards the future of superintelligence.

Teaming up with him is Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, who will focus on turning advanced AI research into real-world products.

But what’s really turning heads is the lineup of AI heavyweights Meta has pulled from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and Google Research. This team isn’t just impressive — it’s basically a who’s who of the people behind the most powerful AI models we’ve seen in recent years.

Among them is Trapit Bansal, one of the brains behind OpenAI’s o-series models, and Shuchao Bi, who worked on GPT-4o’s voice capabilities. Huiwen Chang, famous for developing image-generation models at Google and OpenAI, is also on board. Then there’s Jack Rae, who helped lead DeepMind’s Gemini project, and Joel Pobar, a former Meta veteran who recently worked at Anthropic.

The list continues with Ji Lin, Hongyu Ren, Johan Schalkwyk, Pei Sun, Jiahui Yu, and Shengjia Zhao, all of whom have been instrumental in shaping the AI models that dominate headlines today.

If that wasn’t enough, reports suggest that a few more names, including researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich office, have also quietly joined Meta, though they weren’t mentioned in the official post.

With this dream team now in place, Meta is sending a clear message: it’s not just playing catch-up in the AI race. It’s here to lead and it’s betting big on superintelligence to get there.