IITian with stints at Google, Microsoft, OpenAI now ‘thrilled’ to join Meta’s top AI team | Trending

Indian-origin Trapit Bansal has become the latest high-profile employee to quit OpenAI and join Meta. Bansal was described TechCrunch as “a highly influential OpenAI researcher” and a key player in the company’s work on reinforcement learning. IITian Trapit Bansal has announced he will be joining Meta In a post shared on the social media platform X this morning, the IIT Kanpur graduate confirmed that he will be joining Meta’s new superintelligence unit, for which Mark Zuckerberg has been on a hiring spree and has poached several influential OpenAI researchers. What Trapit Bansal postedTrapit Bansal confirmed that he will be joining Meta in an X post this morning. Bansal holds a degree in Mathematics and Statics from IIT Kanpur, a master’s in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD in Computer Science, also from UMass Amherst. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has held research internship positions at IISc Bangalore, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Between January 2022 and June 2025, he worked with OpenAI. Announcing his job switch, San Francisco-based Bansal wrote, “Thrilled to be joining Meta! Superintelligence is now in sight.”   OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed to TechCrunch that Bansal had left the AI firm. Meta’s AI pushMeta, once regarded as a frontrunner in open-source artificial intelligence, has recently faced setbacks due to a wave of staff departures and delays in releasing new models that could rival those from Google, OpenAI, and China’s DeepSeek, according to Reuters. Amid this turbulence, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced a major reorganisation of the company’s AI efforts. In an internal memo reviewed Bloomberg, Zuckerberg said Meta’s AI initiatives will now fall under a newly formed unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). The division will be led Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data-labelling startup Scale AI. Zuckerberg described Wang as the “most impressive founder of his generation,” and he will take on the role of chief AI officer at Meta, according to the report. “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.” In pursuit of this ambition, Zuckerberg has ramped up hiring for his superintelligence unit, bringing on board several influential AI researchers who previously worked at OpenAI, including Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. Speaking on the Uncapped podcast in mid-June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman commented on Meta’s aggressive recruitment tactics. He claimed that Meta “started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team” with “$100 million signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year.”