Meta’s 44-member AI super team revealed; only two Indians on the list

Meta has been working day and night to recruit the best AI talent for its new Superintelligence team, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally spearheading the search. While recruiting aggressively, Meta is said to have attempted to poach talent from prominent companies such as OpenAI and Apple. A social media user has now posted a 44-employee list of employees in detail, which he says he received from a company employee who wished to remain anonymous. Posting the unofficial list on X, the user captioned, “All of these individuals are probably being paid $10-$100M/yr.”

According to the post, 50% of the recruits are Chinese, out of which 75% are PhDs and 70%are researchers. OpenAI contributes the most at 40%. Next is Google's DeepMind at 20%, followed by 15% from Scale. Though this has appeared on social media, WION cannot verified about the claim independently.

What we know about the new joiners?

Just two Indian-origin researchers have made it to the list – Trapit Bansal and Hammad Syed. Bansal is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur who did postgraduate research at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He had worked with Meta in 2018. Bansal had worked in four of the world's top AI institutions – OpenAI, Microsoft Research, Google Research and Facebook.

Syed, who came on board Meta last week, co-founded voice startup PlayAI with Mahmoud Felfel in 2021. The firm is now able to create realistic text-to-speech models and voice agents for over 30 languages. According to a report in Bloomberg, it said the "entire PlayAI team" would join the Meta team, according to an internal memo. Apple AI researchers Mark Lee and Tom Gunter joined Meta Superintelligence AI team as the latest members. Earlier, Ruoming Pang, who headed Apple AI models team earlier, was reportedly poached with a compensation package of over $200 million. Lee and Gunter were reportedly close colleagues with Pang at Apple.