TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Four researchers at OpenAI have left the company to join Meta, as reported by Wired on Sunday, June 29, 2025. Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren have joined Meta’s superintelligence team. Their profile on OpenAI Slack has been deactivated.
This is the latest aggressive move in a series of aggressive moves by Mark Zuckerberg, who is racing to catch up with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in building artificial intelligence (AI).
Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta had made a “big offer” to the OpenAI staff with a $100 million signing bonus (about Rp 1.6 trillion). He added that “none of our top people decided to take it.”
A Wired source at OpenAI confirmed the offer. Hongyu Ren leads the post-training at OpenAI for the o3 and o4 mini models, along with upcoming open-source models to be released this summer, said multiple sources. Post-training is the process of refining models after being trained on primary data sets.
According to another source, Shengjia Zhao is an expert in deep learning research. He joined OpenAI in the summer of 2022 and helped build the GPT-4 model for the startup.
Jiahui Yu had previously worked at Google DeepMind before joining OpenAI in late 2023. Shuchao Bi is a multimodal model manager at OpenAI.
The exodus from OpenAI comes shortly after the company lost three researchers from its Zurich office, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI and Meta have not responded to the departures.
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