Meta has led a poaching frenzy in recent weeks to hire top AI talent for its recently established Superintelligence Team with CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally spearheading the aggressive talent raid. The growing team includes only two Indian-origin researchers — Trapit Bansal and Hammad Syed. The social media giant is among several technology companies that have struck high-profile deals and doled out multi-million-dollar pay packages to fast-track development of machines that could surpass humans intelligence.
The Facebook and Instagram parent recently unveiled the Meta Superintelligence Labs to unify the its AI efforts, following setbacks with its Llama 4 model and key staff departures. The MSL will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman — after Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale and ramped up efforts to recruit top AI talent.
Who are Trapit Bansal and Hammad Syed?
IIT Kanpur alumnus Trapit Bansal is one of only two Indians recruited for the new Meta lab. He had undertaken postgraduate research at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and previously worked with Meta in 2018. Bansal boasts an unlikely resume that includes lengthy stints at four of the world’s biggest AI institutions — OpenAI, Microsoft Research, Google Research and Facebook.
Meanwhile Hammad Syed joined Meta earlier this week after the tech giant acquired his company. Voice startup PlayAI was founded by Syed and Mahmoud Felfel in 2021 and is now capable of building lifelike text-to-speech models and voice agents in over 30 languages. According to a Bloomberg report, an internal memo stated that the “entire PlayAI team” will be joining the Meta team.
Meta hires two Apple AI researchers
Hiring for the Meta Superintelligence AI team continued in full swing this week — with artificial intelligence researchers Mark Lee and Tom Gunter becoming its latest members. Their exit comes mere weeks after Ruoming Pang (who had previously run the Apple AI models team) was poached with a pay package of more than $200 million. Lee and Gunter had reportedly worked closely with Pang at Apple. According to a Bloomberg update, Lee has already left Apple and started working at Meta while Gunter is set to join the new team soon.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that his social media platform would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers.
