(Reuters) -Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged hundreds of billions of dollars towards building massive data centers, days after ratcheting up the AI race with the launch of a division made up of engineers poached from rivals he hopes to challenge.
Zuckerberg has intensified Silicon Valley’s talent war through aggressive hiring and startup deals, as he tries to catch up with rivals such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic after the poor performance of the Facebook parent’s Llama 4 model.
Here is a list of the new recruits at Meta: ALEXANDR WANG
Meta hired the former Scale AI CEO to head the new division as chief AI officer, according to a memo reviewed by Reuters.
Zuckerberg has also hired some Scale AI staff after the company invested $14.3 billion in the data-labeling startup.
NAT FRIEDMAN
The former GitHub CEO will co-lead the unit with Wang and head the company’s work on AI products and applied research.
Friedman co-founded venture capital firm NFDG, which has backed high-profile startups including Safe Superintelligence, Perplexity and Figma.
DANIEL GROSS
The former CEO of AI startup Safe Superintelligence has joined the team to lead the AI products division, sources told Reuters.
Gross had co-founded NFDG.
RUOMING PANG
Pang was the head of Apple’s Foundation Models team and responsible for advanced AI features, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
He joined Meta with a multi-million-dollar compensation package, according to Bloomberg News.
TRAPIT BANSAL
The AI researcher joined OpenAI in 2022, where he played a key role in developing the “o-series” reasoning models.
Bansal has directly worked with OpenAI and Safe Superintelligence co-founder Ilya Sutskever, according to his LinkedIn page.
SHUCHAO BI
Bi joined OpenAI in 2024 after working for over 10 years at YouTube and Google.
He co-founded YouTube Shorts and built multi-stage deep learning models to optimize Google Ads performance, according to his LinkedIn page.
HUIWEN CHANG
Chang joined OpenAI in 2023 after working as a Research Scientist at Google for more than four years, according to her LinkedIn page.
She is a co-creator of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s multimodal model, and invented MaskGIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research.
JI LIN
Lin joined OpenAI in 2023, where he contributed to building advanced multimodal reasoning systems and Operator reasoning stack, OpenAI’s computer-using agent architecture.
JOEL POBAR
Pobar joined Anthropic in 2023, where he oversaw infrastructure and inference pipelines for large language models. He also worked at Meta for about 11 years.
JACK RAE
Rae was a pre‑training technical lead for Google DeepMind’s Gemini and spearheaded the reasoning development for Gemini 2.5.
HONGYU REN
Ren joined OpenAI in 2023, co-creating multiple o‑series and GPT‑4o models. He helped lead post-training efforts for the ChatGPT maker’s most advanced reasoning models.
JOHAN SCHALKWYK
Schalkwyk was a former Google Fellow and oversaw major research and product integrations in speech AI.
He has joined Meta Superintelligence Labs as a Voice Lead, according to his LinkedIn page.
PEI SUN
Sun worked on post-training, coding and reasoning for Gemini at Google DeepMind. He previously created the last two generations of self-driving unit Waymo’s perception models.
JIAHUI YU
Yu joined OpenAI in 2023. Previously, he led the perception team at the AI startup. He co-created o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o models.
SHENGJIA ZHAO
Zhao worked as a research scientist at OpenAI. He co-created ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models, 4.1 and o3.
JASON WEI
Wei is joining Meta, WIRED reported on Tuesday, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter.
Wei became part of OpenAI in 2023, where he worked on the o1 and deep research models, after working at Google for more than two years, according to his personal website.
HYUNG WON CHUNG
Chung will also be joining Meta, according to the WIRED report.
He joined OpenAI in 2023 after working at Google, according to his website.
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese, Jaspreet Singh and Kritika Lamba in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas)
