Meet man who, studied at IIT Kanpur, now joins Meta’s Superintelligence team after leaving OpenAI, he is...

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp, has quietly managed to recruit several key researchers from OpenAI, including a standout AI specialist known as Trapit Bansal. This move comes despite OpenAI chief Sam Altman’s confident claim that “none of our best people” were tempted by rival offers. In reality, Meta’s new “superintelligence” team is taking shape, and it may well accelerate the company’s efforts to compete with AI pioneers like OpenAI and Google.

Bansal, whose LinkedIn profile indicates he left OpenAI in June 2025, is reported to be joining Meta’s freshly established lab dedicated to creating advanced AI reasoning models. Although he has not publicly confirmed his new employer, insiders say he will be part of a group for which Mark Zuckerberg has personally offered compensation packages of up to USD 100 million. At OpenAI, Bansal served as a “member of technical staff” from January 2022 onwards and helped develop “o1,” the organisation’s first commercially available AI reasoning model.

A Proven Track Record in AI Research

Trapit Bansal’s credentials are impressive. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 2012 with degrees in mathematics and statistics, before earning a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His doctoral research focused on meta-learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. Before joining OpenAI, Bansal gained experience with internships at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—some of the biggest names in technology.

While at OpenAI, he collaborated closely with co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever on early breakthroughs in AI reasoning and reinforcement learning. His work was instrumental in giving ChatGPT and other OpenAI models a significant head start in solving complex tasks and guiding them towards the broader goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—machines capable of human-like understanding and problem-solving.

Building the Future of AI at Meta

At Meta’s new AI Superintelligence lab, Bansal will join other high-profile recruits, such as former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Rumours suggest that GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Gross could also be in talks to come on board. The lab is poised to design Meta’s first public AI reasoning model, a crucial step if the company hopes to rival or surpass OpenAI’s O3 model.

In recent weeks, Meta has also welcomed three more researchers from OpenAI—Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai—strengthening its team with expertise in computer vision and machine learning. With this influx of talent, Meta appears determined to challenge the current leaders in artificial intelligence and carve out its own path to developing truly intelligent machines.