Zuck's Eleven
Step aside, Traitorous Eight, there's a new group of ship jumpers in Silicon Valley. In his memo announcing his new AI organization, the Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Mark Zuckerberg specifically lists out eleven new Meta employees who have come on board for this effort. Well, technically the list is thirteen if you include the new leads of the group, Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman. But I'm sorry, I need to reference Ocean's 11 with my headline and image here – also, the original – as it's superior to Ocean's 13.
Ruthlessly, Zuck lists out not just the names of the eleven, but where they're coming from and what they did at those old places of employment. Here they are, per the memo obtained by Jonathan Vanian for CNBC:
- Trapit Bansal -- pioneered RL on chain of thought and co-creator of o-series models at OpenAI.
- Shuchao Bi -- co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. Previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAI.
- Huiwen Chang -- co-creator of GPT-4o’s image generation, and previously invented MaskGIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research
- Ji Lin -- helped build o3/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, 4o-imagegen, and Operator reasoning stack.
- Joel Pobar – inference at Anthropic. Previously at Meta for 11 years on HHVM, Hack, Flow, Redex, performance tooling, and machine learning.
- Jack Rae -- pre-training tech lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2.5. Led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind.
- Hongyu Ren -- co-creator of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o3 and o4-mini. Previously leading a group for post-training at OpenAI.
- Johan Schalkwyk – former Google Fellow, early contributor to Sesame, and technical lead for Maya.
- Pei Sun – post-training, coding, and reasoning for Gemini at Google Deepmind. Previously created the last two generations of Waymo’s perception models.
- Jiahui Yu – co-creator of o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o. Previously led the perception team at OpenAI, and co-led multimodal at Gemini.
- Shengjia Zhao – co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models, 4.1 and o3. Previously led synthetic data at OpenAI.
By my count, that's:
- 7 from OpenAI
- 2 from Google
- 1 from Anthropic
- 1 from Sesame
That's... a lot from OpenAI.1 Now you see why they were sending around internal notes that sound quite shaken and stirred – "someone has broken into our home".2 I can't speak directly to the quality of this team, that's above my pay grade (clearly), but it certainly seems more impactful than the downplaying of the poaching a couple weeks back by Sam Altman. It may or may not be their "best people" – but it's a lot, no question. Money wins, and all that.
Beyond that, the most interesting aspects of the memo are what's not mentioned.
Most notably, Friedman's investing partner, Daniel Gross. This immediately jumped out to me because he would be a massive get by Meta, given not just his AI work and investing through the NFDG fund, but also his current role as um, CEO of Safe Superintelligence. You know, the other "superintelligence" effort, started by Ilya Sutskever as his post-OpenAI project. And the one currently valued at $32B despite having just been started and not having any products in market – in fact, they may never have any products in market, but I digress.
It was wild that Gross was apparently going to jump over to Meta. Especially since reports stated that Zuckerberg had tried to hire Sutskever himself (and presumably tried to acquired SSI), but was rebuffed. Divide and conquer, a common tactic used by the Romans in Gaul! Again, ruthless. But the fact that Gross isn't listed here may suggest one of two things. First, either his deal isn't finalized yet.3 Second, that someone, maybe Sutskever, maybe the investors in SSI, got to him and pulled him back from the brink. I suspect we'll hear more about this very soon.
Also not mentioned in the memo: Yann LeCun. Never one to be quiet about the current state of AI, he's been awfully restrained in the past couple of weeks as all of this has swirled around. On the other hand, while he's been against all the talk about achieving AGI through LLMs, he's apparently on board with ASI. Still, it seems weird not to even mention your Chief AI Scientist when you just hired a Chief AI Officer...
Meta's previous model work with Llama does get one paragraph – seven paragraphs into the memo:
I’m excited about the progress we have planned for Llama 4.1 and 4.2. These models power Meta AI, which is used by more than 1 billion monthly actives across our apps and an increasing number of agents across Meta that help improve our products and technology. We’re committed to continuing to build out these models.
Leading with "I'm excited" probably says all you need to know there. But just in case, the billions now being spent to play catch up after the billions spent on Llama drills home the point: Llama, at least as we previously knew it, is yesterday's AI news within Meta.
In parallel, we’re going to start research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so. I’ve spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort. We’re still forming this group and we’ll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well.
"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy." We're gonna need a picture of this group together, for good measure. Ideally in suits. But one well-placed bow-tie and a pirate flag will work too. Fine, I'll accept one in front of the Bellagio fountain.
One more thing: one phrase never mentioned once in the entire memo: "open source". Interesting.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 With a special shout-out to Google as 5 worked there at some point, which continues the narrative that modern AI was very much born at Google but they let aspects slip away.
2 And it doesn't include the three OpenAI employees moving over that were previously announced/reported. So that's... 10 from OpenAI alone.
3 The fact that Zuck states that Friedman will "define his role going forward" – not to mention the sloppiness of the whole "lead" and "partner to lead" element for Wang and Friedman around MSL suggests this was all a bit rushed. And that may lend credence to Gross' deal simply not being done. We'll see.