June 28 EST: Meta Platforms has pulled off another major recruitment play, hiring four more top-tier AI researchers from OpenAI, according to a report from The Information, relayed by Reuters. The fresh hires — Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren — are the latest recruits to join Meta’s increasingly aggressive push to dominate the frontier of artificial intelligence.
These moves are part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s high-stakes bid to assemble an elite team tasked with advancing the company’s ambitious AI agenda — internally referred to as the “superintelligence” initiative.
A Poaching Spree With Purpose
This isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern — and a pressure campaign.
Earlier this year, Meta also scooped up Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, three prominent researchers based at OpenAI’s Zurich office, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Combined, these defections signal a deepening talent war at the top echelons of machine learning.
Zuckerberg’s secret weapon? A top-secret internal list of the “must-hire” minds in the AI world, and lavish pay packages aimed at closing the deal. Axios recently reported that Meta has created this private target list — dubbed “The List” — and is chasing it with open checkbooks and executive urgency.
The LLaMA Problem
The timing here is telling.
Meta’s aggressive recruitment spree comes just months after the launch of LLaMA 4, its latest open-source large language model. Despite the buzz, early feedback was lukewarm, prompting a reevaluation at the top. With OpenAI and Anthropic releasing models that reportedly outperform LLaMA 4 in both safety and reasoning benchmarks, Meta appears to be playing catch-up — and it’s now doing it with people, not just product.
“We realized the only way to win this long term is with world-class research,” said a senior Meta AI insider, speaking anonymously to TechCrunch. “The model race is going to be won by brains, not bandwidth.”
Bonus Backlash and Billion-Dollar Myths
Meta’s hiring blitz hasn’t come without controversy.
After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested that rival companies were offering $100 million signing bonuses, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth shot back publicly, calling those claims “exaggerated and misleading.” Bosworth clarified the real figures applied only to the most senior researchers and likely included long-term equity rather than immediate cash.
Meanwhile, Lucas Beyer — one of the new Meta hires — took to social media to flatly deny receiving any such bonus, dismissing the claim as “fake news.”
The debate underscores how opaque — and potentially inflated — the AI talent market has become, especially for researchers at the bleeding edge.
What’s at Stake
The battle for AI dominance is no longer just about product features or GPU access. It’s about the people building the foundation models that will shape everything from search to software to social media.
Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon are all reportedly escalating compensation, research freedom, and team autonomy to lure the brightest minds. But Meta, despite its LLaMA stumbles, is signaling that it’s ready to go toe-to-toe — and it’s not afraid to disrupt the industry to do it.
According to Axios, Zuckerberg has privately said he sees Meta’s AI division as critical to the company’s next decade — with superintelligence research now a top-tier strategic priority, rivaling even the metaverse.
A Shifting AI Power Map
The long-term implications of Meta’s OpenAI raids remain to be seen. But one thing is clear: the AI talent arms race is not slowing down — it’s intensifying.
For OpenAI, it’s a test of internal culture and retention. For Meta, it’s a bet that the right team can overcome a wobbly model launch and leapfrog the competition. For the industry, it’s another chapter in what’s shaping up to be a generational reordering of power — not just in tech, but in science.
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