Indian origin AI researcher who ditched Sam Altman for Zuckerberg says: ‘Superintelligence is now in sight’ | Mint-OxBig News Network

OpenAI has had a major headache on its hands in recent days as Meta has poached many of its top AI researchers. If OpenAI chief Sam Altman is to be believed, Meta is offering its new joiners from OpenAI signing bonuses of up to $100 million to lure them into joining the social media giant’s AI efforts.

One of the employees who left OpenAI for Meta is Trapit Bansal, who had worked at the company since 2022 and is credited with kickstarting the ChatGPT maker’s reinforcement learning efforts alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever.

According to Bansal’s X account (formerly Twitter), he is also a foundational contributor to the company’s first-ever reasoning model, o1. He holds a Master of Science degree in Mathematics and Statistics from IIT Kanpur and is also an alumnus of IISc Bangalore.

Prior to joining OpenAI full-time in 2022, Bansal worked as a research intern at other major tech companies, including Microsoft and Google.

While Bansal’s role at Meta is not immediately clear, his post suggests he could work at the company’s superintelligence lab alongside Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and other top AI leaders.

In a post on X announcing his move to Meta, Bansal wrote: “Thrilled to be joining @Meta! Superintelligence is now in sight 🚀”

Mark Zuckerberg’s Superintelligence group

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg on Monday announced in an internal memo that the company’s artificial intelligence efforts will now fall under a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), which will be led by Wang, whom he described as the “most impressive founder of his generation,” according to Bloomberg.

The group aims to build AI “superintelligence” systems that can complete tasks as well as, or even better than, humans. Alongside Wang, it will also include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who will “partner with Alex to lead” the group.

“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg wrote in the internal post.

“I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way,” he added.