Meta has hired Trapit Bansal, a highly influential researcher from OpenAI, to work on its AI reasoning models under the company’s new AI superintelligence unit. Bansal, who had joined OpenAI in 2022, was a key player in starting the company’s work on reinforcement learning alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever. He is listed as a foundational contributor on OpenAI’s first AI reasoning model, o1.
Bansal could provide significant contributions to Meta’s superintelligence lab by developing a frontier AI reasoning model that’s competitive with industry-leading technology such as OpenAI’s o3 or DeepSeek’s R1. Meta’s superintelligence lab also features other industry leaders like former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. It is also looking to add former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Gross.
Bansal is the latest among a number of former OpenAI top employees newly recruited by Meta. Three other former OpenAI researchers — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — have also joined Meta’s AI superintelligence team in recent weeks.
READ: OpenAI responds to Meta offers, claims it is like ‘someone has broken into our home’ (June 30, 2025)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had touched on Meta’s recruitment efforts on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman. “[Meta has] started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Sam Altman said on the podcast. “You know, like, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in] compensation per year […] I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that,” he said, perhaps speaking too soon.
OpenAI’s chief research office, Mark Chen responded to recent developments by sending out a strongly-worded memo. “I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote. “Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.” He also added that he was working with Altman and other leaders at the company “around the clock to talk to those with offers.”
“We’ve been more proactive than ever before, we’re recalibrating comp, and we’re scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent,” he said.
READ: Meta taps OpenAI talent: 3 OpenAI researchers join the rivaling tech giant (June 26, 2025)
Chen also stated that while he was keen on retaining OpenAI’s staff, he wouldn’t do it at the “price of fairness to others”. He also said that the company is getting “too caught up in the cadence of regular product launches and in short term comparison with the competition. “We need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to compute (a lot more supercomputers are coming online later this year) into intelligence,” he wrote.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is said to be personally leading Meta’s global AI talent hunt, reaching out directly to top researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs through emails and WhatsApp. According to The Wall Street Journal, he’s been coordinating recruitment through a group chat “Recruiting Party” and following up with private dinners at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe.