Zuckerberg has recruited the top minds in artificial intelligence and put together a superintelligence team to compete in the race! What has drawn the most attention? Surprisingly, it hasn’t been the millions he’s spent, but the origin of his new stars: most are Chinese engineers, many of them from OpenAI! It’s a move aimed at putting Meta at the forefront of AI… spending over 100 million dollars!
Eleven members have been confirmed so far, seven of them Chinese and six coming directly from OpenAI, and the shock has been felt from Silicon Valley to China. If you thought the future of AI was being written in Chinese… maybe it’s being written in Chinese from an office in California!
Zuckerberg’s new secret team
Meta doesn’t want to be left behind (no one does), and the race to dominate AI is getting very interesting. Google and OpenAI are currently at the top, but Zuckerberg has gone on the offensive and started building what many are already calling the “AI dream team.” With big checks, of course. Meta’s CEO has offered up to 100 million dollars per head to attract the best engineers in the world.
The team is already partially formed and includes eleven star recruits, not counting Alexandr Wang, the director of the new team.
Who are they?
- Bi Suchao (China, OpenAI): Co-creator of GPT-4o’s voice mode and o4-mini
- Chang Huiwen (OpenAI, China): Co-creator of GPT-4o’s image generator
- Lin Ji (OpenAI, China): Worked on several language models, from GPT-4o to GPT-4.5
- Ren Hongyu (OpenAI, China): Led the post-training team
- Sun Pei (Google, China): Was the lead researcher at DeepMind and played a key role in the creation of Gemini
- Zhao Shengjia (OpenAI, China): Key to the development of ChatGPT
- Yu Jiahui (OpenAI, China): Led the perception team
- Joel Pobar (Anthropic, Australia): Worked on inference systems
- Trapit Bansal (OpenAI, India): Pioneer in combining reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought
- Jack Rae (Google, United States): Research scientist at DeepMind
- Johan Schalkwyk (Sesame, United States): Expert in language technologies
As you can see, they all come from leading companies in the sector.
China leads Meta’s offensive
As you can see, the talent that has caught the tycoon’s attention comes from China. And although the country is celebrating the recognition of national talent, there’s a strange feeling about the brain drain to the United States. It’s believed that 38% of AI experts working in the US were trained in China!
Why do so many Chinese talents end up in Silicon Valley?
China has been quietly cultivating STEM talent for over three decades, and now that effort is bearing fruit. It’s a pool of experts leading global rankings, even if it’s on the other side of the ocean. According to Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, 50% of AI researchers are Chinese, a figure that explains why Zuckerberg has focused on this profile.
But it also reveals a deeper issue: if the best Chinese engineers work in the US, China’s supposed future dominance in AI might just be an illusion, since it’s the American big tech companies that are benefiting from the training efforts of the Asian giant.
OpenAI, the other big loser
If there’s one company that has taken a major hit after Hurricane Zuckerberg, it’s OpenAI. At first, only four exits were expected, but seven employees have joined the tycoon’s group.
Mark Chen, OpenAI’s director of research, expressed his frustration by saying it felt like someone had robbed his own home (and that’s pretty much what happened). OpenAI tried to retain its talent with counteroffers, but the numbers couldn’t compete with Meta’s checks. Money always wins…
Zuckerberg is paying soccer star salaries and is sparing no resources: he also invested over 14 billion in Scale AI, which is now led by Alexandr Wang.
China and the global AI race
While the United States is far ahead, China is closing the gap alarmingly fast. In just one year, the quality gap between American and Chinese models has narrowed from 9.26% to 1.7%. China is betting on more efficient and cheaper models.
If they manage to slow the brain drain, China’s supremacy in this field could become unstoppable.
What happens now?
Zuckerberg already has his team, and Meta is preparing for a new leap. With elite engineers and millions of dollars on the table, Meta could once again be at the center of the tech conversation. Is this a talent war?