Meta continues its aggressive recruitment drive, recently hiring additional top-tier researchers away from OpenAI. Following the high-profile move of influential OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal earlier this week, four more key talents—Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren—are now reportedly joining the social media giant’s AI research team.
This series of strategic hires is happening as Meta grapples with the lukewarm reception of its flagship AI model, Llama 4, released in April. Despite ambitious expectations, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly found the model’s performance underwhelming. Furthermore, Meta faced criticism earlier this year for its lower-than-anticipated scores on a widely-used AI benchmark when testing Llama.
The inflow of talent from OpenAI highlights an ongoing rivalry between the two tech giants. Recently, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, mentioned publicly that Meta was offering considerable sums—upwards of “$100 million signing bonuses”—to attract OpenAI staff, though he maintained that none of their top-tier researchers had left the company. In response, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth addressed these assertions internally, acknowledging substantial financial incentives being offered, but clarifying that these incentives represented complex compensation packages rather than simplistic lump-sum signing bonuses.
These latest recruitments underscore Meta’s intensified push to strengthen its position in the highly competitive artificial intelligence space.
