Trapit Bansal leaves OpenAI for Meta

Trapit Bansal, a prominent Indian-origin AI researcher and co-creator of OpenAI's o-series models, has left OpenAI to join Meta Platforms' newly established Superintelligence Labs. This move is part of a broader trend of high-profile departures from OpenAI to Meta Platforms, as Mark Zuckerberg intensifies efforts to dominate the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI). Bansal, an IIT Kanpur and IISc graduate, brings expertise in reasoning models, having contributed to OpenAI's first reasoning model, o1, and the RL for reasoning initiative with Ilya Sutskever. Meta Platforms has been aggressively recruiting top AI talent, reportedly offering compensation packages up to $100 million. Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI (in which Meta Platforms holds a 49% stake), leads the new Superintelligence Labs, co-led by former Microsoft — GitHub CEO Ari Friedman. This talent acquisition strategy by Meta Platforms has drawn mixed reactions from industry experts and institutional investors, with some questioning its sustainability despite Meta Platforms' climbing stock.