Meta has hired multiple researchers from OpenAI in a fresh push tied to its “superintelligence” effort, according to reports published in late June 2025. The moves come as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly described aggressive recruiting attempts by Meta, including signing bonuses that could reach $100 million.
Reuters reported that Meta hired Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, citing a Wall Street Journal report that said the trio had been working at OpenAI’s Zurich office. An OpenAI official confirmed to Reuters that the three researchers left OpenAI, while Meta did not respond to requests for comment made outside regular business hours, Reuters said.
Seven reported OpenAI hires in days
Two days after the report about the three Zurich-based researchers, Reuters reported that Meta was hiring four more OpenAI artificial intelligence researchers, citing a report from The Information. Reuters said The Information identified those four as Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren, citing a person familiar with the hires.
Separately, SiliconANGLE reported that Meta recruited four former OpenAI researchers for what it called a newly launched “superintelligence” lab, naming Trapit Bansal along with Beyer, Kolesnikov, and Zhai. SiliconANGLE said Bansal joined OpenAI in 2022 and “played a key role” in launching OpenAI’s reinforcement learning program, describing reinforcement learning as a method that can be useful for building reasoning models.
SiliconANGLE also reported that Beyer, Kolesnikov, and Zhai helped establish OpenAI’s Zurich office late the prior year, and that they previously worked at Google DeepMind. Reuters’ report identified the same trio and described them as coming from OpenAI’s Zurich office, without adding those background details.
Altman describes big Meta offers
In a June 18, 2025 article, CNBC reported that Altman said Meta tried to recruit OpenAI employees using signing bonuses that could go up to $100 million, along with even larger annual compensation packages. CNBC also reported that Altman said Meta had tried to hire “a lot of people” from OpenAI, but that so far none of OpenAI’s “best people” had accepted.
CNBC said it contacted Meta for comment and did not receive an immediate response. CNBC also reported that Altman said he had heard Meta sees OpenAI as its main competitor, and that he characterized Meta’s approach as aggressive.
Meta’s broader “superintelligence” push
Both Reuters and SiliconANGLE framed the hiring as part of Meta’s “superintelligence” effort or initiative. SiliconANGLE reported that Meta had been forming a superintelligence research group and said the unit would be tasked with developing AI models that can outperform humans across many tasks.
SiliconANGLE reported that Meta launched the unit after issues tied to “Llama 4 Behemoth,” which it described as an internally developed large language model that Meta previewed earlier in the year, and said Meta delayed its launch over performance concerns. CNBC also reported that Meta delayed the launch of its latest flagship AI model due to performance concerns, citing a Wall Street Journal report.
Beyond hiring from OpenAI, SiliconANGLE reported that Meta hired ScaleAI CEO Alexandr Wang and invested $14.3 billion in ScaleAI for a 49% stake. SiliconANGLE also reported that Meta planned to spend up to $65 billion in the year on data center infrastructure and was planning a new data center with more than 1.3 million Nvidia graphics cards to support its AI programs.
