More recently, Mark Zuckerberg has been on a hiring spree in order to build out Meta’s new AI team, offering $100 million compensation packages to top researchers who join the company. It’s still unclear what Bansal was offered in this deal.
Nevertheless, it seems that Zuckerberg has been successful at dealing with AI research talent. According to The Wall Street Journal, three other former OpenAI researchers — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — have recently joined Meta’s AI superintelligence team. Bloomberg reports that Bansal will be joining them, along with former Google DeepMind researcher Jack Rae and Johan Schalkwyk, previously the machine learning lead at startup Sesame.
To go further into its news AI unit, Zuckerberg reportedly tried to acquire a startup with heavy-hitting AI. Even more so, on a recent podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly claimed that “none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.”.
AI reasoning models are a critical focus for Meta’s AI superintelligence team. Over the past year, companies like OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek have released powerful reasoning models that significantly expand the capabilities of software. These models improve performance by allowing AI to process problems more deliberately, taking extra time and computation to reason through tasks before responding. This approach has led to notable gains on both benchmarks and real-world applications.
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