Who are the 11 AI experts hired by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta? Fun fact

In a bid to push AI amid rising demand, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reorganised the company’s structure, hiring 11 top AI researchers for its brand-new SuperIntelligence Lab.

Zuckerberg has brought on 11 new hires in the AI field, including researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, according to multiple reports, as the AI war between tech companies intensifies.

While the 11 new AI experts are from different companies, they have one thing in common—none of them has a bachelor’s degree from the US, and all are immigrants.

Trapit Bansal

Worked previously at OpenAI

Education: Master of Science (M.Sc. Integrated), Mathematics & Statistics, IIT Kanpur; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.

About: Trapit Bansal is credited with his groundbreaking research on AI, which helps AI models improve logical step-by-step problem-solving abilities. His industrial work is cited widely and has affected both industrial and academic AI models.

Shuchao Bi

Worked previously at OpenAI

Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), Zhejiang University, China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of California, Berkeley, USA.

About: Shuchao Bi is a well-known name in the multimodal AI field, and has co-developed the voice mode for GPT-4o and the o4-mini model. His work has been key to advancements in conversational AI.

Huiwen Chang

Worked previously at Google Research

Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), Tsinghua University, China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Princeton University, USA.

About: Huiwen Chang is the brain behind MaskIT and Muse architectures, which have become the foundational models in creating generative AI images. She led the GPT-4o image generation team.

Ji Lin

Worked previously at OpenAI

Education: Bachelor of Engineering (BEng), Tsinghua University, China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

About: Ji Ling played a crucial part in optimising and scaling large language models such as GPT-4o and the o4 group. His work has made AI images more cost-effective.

Also Read | What is Meta Super Intelligence Labs? Why is Meta poaching AI talent?

Joel Pobar

Worked previously at Anthropic and Meta

Education: Bachelor of Information Technology (Honours), Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia.

About: Joel Pobar has over a decade of experience in building scalable AI models. A part of technologies like HHVM, Hack, and PyTorch, his work enables AI models to run efficiently at scale.

Jack Rae

Worked previously at Google DeepMind

Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), University of Bristol, UK; Master of Science (MS), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University College London (UCL), UK.

About: Jack Rae is a leader in large-scale language model research. He has pre-trained Gemini 2.5, and has developed Google’s Gopher and Chinchilla models.

Also Read | AI talent war: OpenAI scrambles to hike pay as top talent flees to Meta— Report

Hongyu Ren

Worked previously at OpenAI

Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), Peking University, China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Stanford University, USA.

About: Hongy Ren is credited with the post-training of GPT-4o and the o1/3/4o-mini models to increase reliability and robustness. His research focuses on making AI safer and trustworthy.

Johan Schalkwyk

Worked previously at Google

Education: Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BS MEng), University of Pretoria, South Africa.

About: A Google fellow and speech recognition expert, Johan Schalkwyk led the Maya team and contributed to Google’s Sesame project in its early days.

Pei Sun

Worked previously at Google DeepMind

Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), Tsinghua University, China; Master of Science (MS), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA.

About: Pei Sun’s research concerns the post-training of advanced AI models and their reasoning. He has also developed the perception systems for Waymo’s self-driving cars.

Also Read | ‘No $100M bonus’: Lucas Beyer confirms Meta switch, counters Sam Altman’s claim

Jiahuai Yu

Worked previously at OpenAI and Gemini

Education: Bachelor of Science (BS), University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), China; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA.

About: Jiahuai Yu’s work focuses on perception and multimodal AI, having been associated with o3/4o-mini and GPT-4/4o. His research enables AI models to generate information from texts, images and more.