Meta Platforms has added two high-profile researchers from OpenAI—Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung—to its Superalignment team within the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs. Both researchers focus on reasoning and reinforcement learning and had their OpenAI Slack access disabled following their departure
Who Are the New Recruits & Why It Matters
- Jason Wei played a key role in developing OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model and has been instrumental in reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought research
- Hyung Won Chung was involved in OpenAI’s o1 agent-based systems and sophisticated decision-making architectures
Their combined move signals Meta’s intensifying efforts to challenge OpenAI’s leadership in next‑generation AI reasoning capabilities.
Meta is reportedly offering compensation packages worth up to $300 million over four years, including immediate equity vesting, to secure elite AI minds
Strategic Move in Meta’s AI Expansion
This latest recruitment is part of Meta’s aggressive hiring push, which now totals at least eight former OpenAI researchers across multiple waves of departures. Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, led by Alexandr Wang (former Scale AI CEO) and Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO), aims to build frontier AI systems capable of reasoning, multimodal understanding, and autonomous agents
Broader Talent War & Industry Reactions
- Meta has pursued competitors’ talent aggressively—from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind—offering lavish incentives to establish its AI team
- OpenAI’s leadership has responded by revisiting retention and compensation strategies in the face of talent attrition, with internal messaging emphasizing concern about these departures WIRED.
- Sam Altman described the poaching as “distasteful,” while highlighting OpenAI’s strong mission-oriented culture over financial lure
What Lies Ahead
| Item | Implication |
|---|---|
| Meta’s capability boost | Access to experienced reasoning-focused researchers may accelerate development of models rivaling OpenAI’s o-series |
| Industry tension | High-stakes recruitment highlight deepening competition within AI ecosystem |
| Talent retention pressure | OpenAI and other labs may step up incentives and cultural alignment to retain core team members |
✅ Conclusion
Meta’s hiring of Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung from OpenAI underscores the intensifying AI talent war, as the company builds out its Superalignment / Superintelligence Labs. These researchers bring critical expertise in reasoning and decision-making models—key for Meta’s ambition to rival OpenAI and others in frontier AI development. As recruitment escalates, competition and cultural alignment are increasingly shaping the future of AI research.
