Looks like Meta isn’t done poaching talent from OpenAI.
Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported that Meta had hired influential OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal, and according to The Wall Street Journal, it also hired three other researchers from the company.
Now The Information is reporting four more Meta hires from OpenAI: Researchers Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren.
This hiring spree comes after the April launch of Meta’s Llama 4 AI models, which reportedly did not perform as well as CEO Mark Zuckerberg had hoped. (The company was also criticized over the version of Llama that it used for a popular benchmark.)
There’s been some back-and-forth between the two companies, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggesting that Meta was offering “$100 million signing bonuses” while adding that “so far, none of our best people” have left. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth then told employees that while senior leaders may have been offered that kind of money, “the actual terms of the offer” were more complex than a simple one-time signing bonus.
