Zuckerberg's $100 million lure: Why top Chinese and Indian AI minds are joining his Superintelligence Project

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just made one of the largest AI wins by assembling a dream team for his new team by hiring some of the world's greatest minds, including influential Chinese and Indian AI experts of ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic, as per a Fortune report.

Meta’s Superintelligence Team: Who’s Leading the Team?

The firm's new "Superintelligence" AI team is co-headed by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and ScaleAI founder Alexandr Wang, who is now Meta's newly appointed Chief AI Officer, according to the report. Wang came on board as part of a $15 billion acquisition that provided Meta with a 49% ownership position in his training data company, ScaleAI, as per the Fortune report.

Meet the AI Stars Joining Meta

Wang shared this list of new recruits for the Superintelligence team on his social media post on X (previously Twitter), saying, “I’m excited to be the Chief AI Officer, working alongside [Nat Friedman],” adding, “We also have several strong new team members joining today or who have joined in the past few weeks that I’m excited to share as well,” as per his X post.


The Fortune report compiled the new recruits list, which includes several prominent former OpenAI researchers, including:

• Trapit Bansal, the co-creator of o-series models at OpenAI.
• Shuchao Bi, co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini.
• Hongyu Ren, who previously led a group for post-training at OpenAI.
• Jiahui Yu, who previously led the perception team at OpenAI.
• Shengjia Zhao, who previously led synthetic data at OpenAI.

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$100 Million Offers? OpenAI Sounds the Alarm

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has pointed out that Zuckerberg has reportedly been personally hiring for Meta’s new 50-person Superintelligence AI team by allegedly offering $100 million signing bonuses to lure top OpenAI researchers, as reported by Fortune.

Altman's remark comes as OpenAI is reportedly scrambling to contain the fallout after a wave of high-profile researcher departures to Meta, and OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen even compared these exits to a home invasion, according to the report by Fortune.

According to a memo seen by Wired, Chen had told employees that OpenAI’s leadership team, including Altman, had been working “around the clock” to retain the company’s top talent, urgently recalibrating compensation and seeking “creative” ways to reward top performers, as reported by Fortune.

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Meta Pushes Back on the Numbers

However, Meta has internally dismissed the figure Altman publicly claimed about $100 million in signing bonuses, according to the report.

During a recent all-hands meeting, which was shared with The Verge, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth said that the real offers Meta was making were more complicated and indicated that only a few very senior people may have been offered that much amount of money, as reported by Fortune.

He pointed out that “the actual terms of the offer” weren’t just “sign-on bonus” but rather “all these different things,” as quoted in the report.

FAQs

Why is Meta suddenly hiring so many top AI researchers?
Meta is building a powerful new AI division called the Superintelligence team, aiming to lead in next-gen artificial intelligence. Hiring top minds gives them a huge edge.

Who are these new hires, and why are they important?
They’re some of the most influential researchers behind OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google Gemini, and Anthropic. Many are from China and India and bring deep technical expertise.