In a significant talent acquisition for its AI ambitions, Meta has recruited Trapit Bansal, a former key researcher at OpenAI who played a foundational role in developing the company's groundbreaking o1 reasoning model.
Bansal, who left OpenAI in June after joining in 2022, was instrumental in kickstarting the company's work on reinforcement learning alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever. His expertise in AI reasoning systems will be crucial for Meta, which currently lacks a public AI reasoning model to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI's o3 and DeepSeek's R1.
The hire comes amid Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive push to build a world-class AI superintelligence team. Frustrated with Meta's shortfalls in AI development—particularly following the underwhelming reception of Llama 4 in April 2025—Zuckerberg has personally led recruitment efforts, reportedly offering compensation packages worth up to $100 million to attract top talent.
Bansal joins an increasingly impressive roster of AI experts at Meta, including former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang (part of a $14.3 billion investment deal), former Google DeepMind researcher Jack Rae, and Johan Schalkwyk, previously a machine learning leader at Sesame. Three other former OpenAI researchers—Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai—have also recently joined Meta's team.
This talent acquisition strategy reflects Zuckerberg's determination to close the gap with competitors like OpenAI and Google in the race to develop artificial general intelligence. Meta's AI superintelligence lab aims to become a key internal group powering products throughout the company, similar to Google's DeepMind unit.
However, Meta faces significant challenges ahead. OpenAI plans to release an open AI reasoning model in the coming weeks, which could further pressure Meta's AI offerings. Additionally, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently claimed that while Meta has attempted to poach his company's top talent, "none of our best people have decided to take him up on that"—a statement now contradicted by Bansal's move.