- Meta’s stock soared to a record high Monday after the company unveiled new hires for its “Superintelligence” team, stacked with top AI talent from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The exodus has reportedly rattled OpenAI’s leadership, with execs working overtime to stop the talent bleed.
Meta stock hit an all-time high on Monday following the news that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had recruited an all-star Superintelligence team that includes key architects of ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and its image-gen tech.
The company’s stock peaked at $747.90 during Monday trading, beating Meta’s previous record set in February this year. Shares closed Monday at a record $738.09, marking a 23% year-to-date gain.
Investors cheered the company’s aggressive push into AI and its hiring spree of talent from major rivals in the space, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Meta’s new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang posted the list of new recruits on X.
Wang recently joined the company as part of a deal that saw Meta investing up to $15 billion for a 49% stake in his training data company, ScaleAI.
Zuckerberg reportedly told staff that former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-lead the group with Wang.
“I’m excited to be the Chief AI Officer, working alongside [Nat Friedman],” he wrote in a post. “We also have several strong new team members joining today or who have joined in the past few weeks that I’m excited to share as well.”
The team includes several prominent former OpenAI researchers, including:
- Trapit Bansal, the co-creator of o-series models at OpenAI.
- Shuchao Bi, co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini.
- Hongyu Ren, who previously led a group for post-training at OpenAI.
- Jiahui Yu, who previously led the perception team at OpenAI.
- Shengjia Zhao, who previously led synthetic data at OpenAI.
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune, made outside normal working hours.
Zuckerberg has reportedly been personally recruiting for Meta’s new 50-person “Superintelligence” AI team, reportedly offering $100m signing bonuses to woo top OpenAI researchers, according to CEO Sam Altman.
OpenAI is reportedly scrambling to contain the fallout after a wave of high-profile researcher departures to Meta, with Chief Research Officer Mark Chen likening the exodus to a home invasion.
In a memo obtained by Wired, Chen told employees that OpenAI’s leadership team, including Altman, had been working “around the clock” to retain the company’s top talent, urgently recalibrating compensation and seeking “creative” ways to reward top performers.
While Altman publicly complained about rumored $100 million signing bonuses, Meta has internally disputed the figure.
In a recent all-hands meeting shared with The Verge, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth said the actual offers Meta was making were more complicated and implied that only a few very senior people may have been offered that kind of money.
He clarified that “the actual terms of the offer” weren’t just “sign-on bonus” but rather “all these different things.”
