Meta has reportedly hired another OpenAI researcher who was working on AI reasoning models to work for their new superintelligence team, as per a report by TechCrunch. The researcher, Trapit Bansal, worked on reinforcement learning directly with OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
Bansal’s LinkedIn lists him as a co-creator of the o1 reasoning model.
Meta’s superintelligence team will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang who was hired recently after a hefty $14.3 billion investment in the AI data labelling startup.
Yesterday, it was also reported that three other OpenAI researchers from their Zurich office had joined Meta.
Bansal will be working alongside them and former Google DeepMind researcher Jack Rae and former ML leader from conversational AI startup, Sesame AI.
Zuckerberg has been frantically trying to bolster AI research at Meta. He is in the middle of negotiating with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Gross.
He has also previously looked into acquiring Sutskever’s startup Safe SuperIntelligence and Perplexity AI.
Notably, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last week that Zuckerberg had tried to offer his employees $100 million joining bonuses but no key researcher had taken him up.
