Immigrants powering US AI push: From Bansal to Chang, Zuckerberg's top AI team is full of immigrants

India Today

10 hours ago

As the AI arms race between Silicon Valley giants intensifies, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is upping the ante with a bold new move — the creation of a brand-new SuperIntelligence Lab and a star-studded lineup of hires to go with it. In what can only be described as a talent heist, Meta has hired 11 of the brightest minds in AI, poaching top talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and beyond. Each new recruit brings high-end expertise to the table, from multimodal systems to LLM safety. But it is interesting to see how none of them hold a bachelor's degree from the United States.advertisementIn other words, Meta's SuperIntelligence Lab team — and in general almost entirety of the US AI push — is powered by immigrants, the same people who are currently on the radar of the Donald Trump administration. So, who are these people? Let's meet Meta's newest brain trust:Trapit BansalBefore joining the Meta team, Trapit Bansal was one of the OpenAI brains. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur, he holds integrated degrees in mathematics and statistics, followed by a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts where he focused on meta-learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. His professional journey blends strong academic foundations with practical experience at some of the world's leading tech firms.Shuchao Bi
Shuchao Bi, formerly of OpenAI, brings his multimodal magic to Meta's SuperIntelligence Lab. A top expert in blending speech and text, Bi played a key role in developing GPT-4o's voice mode and the compact yet powerful o4-mini model. His work bridges the gap between how humans communicate and how AI understands, making digital assistants more fluid, natural, and versatile than ever. From boosting conversational AI to shaping the future of human-machine interaction, Bi's expertise is set to be a game-changer for Meta's AI ambitions.Huiwen ChangPreviously at Google Research, Chang, is a known generative image wizard. She helped design the Muse and MaskIT architectures, the secret sauce behind many AI-generated visuals today. She studied at Tsinghua University in China, and then in Princeton. She also led the image generation work for GPT-4o.Ji LinLin is another OpenAI talent who is a Tsinghua and MIT alumnus. He was instrumental in scaling LLMs like GPT-4o. His work has made high-quality AI image generation more efficient and cost-effective — a major win for large-scale deployment.Joel PobarAfter earning his degree in Australia, Joel Pobar carved out a name for himself as a seasoned infrastructure expert with more than a decade of experience in building scalable AI systems. His work on industry-defining projects like HHVM, Hack, and PyTorch has made him a key player behind the scenes of modern AI. Jack RaeA former employee at Google DeepMind, Rae has a reputation as a language model heavyweight. He's been involved in pre-training major models like Gemini 2.5, Gopher and Chinchilla. With degrees from Bristol, CMU, and UCL, he brings a unique cross-Atlantic academic pedigree.Hongyu RenRen, a Stanford PhD and Peking University grad, worked on post-training GPT-4o and its smaller variants. His research is focused on improving AI reliability, making models safer, more robust, and generally less prone to hallucinations. He is the fourth ex-OpenAI employee.Johan SchalkwykadvertisementA former Googler and a South African speech recognition expert, Schalkwyk helped lead the Maya team and contributed to the early days of the Sesame project. He's now bringing his voice tech expertise to Meta's AI frontier.Pei SunSun's dual degrees from Tsinghua and CMU power his work in post-training advanced AI models. He's also built perception systems for Waymo's autonomous vehicles, giving him a rare edge in real-world AI deployment. He quit Google DeepMind to come onboard with Meta. Jiahuai YuA multimodal maverick, Yu has contributed to a range of powerful models like o3/4o-mini and GPT-4. With degrees from USTC and UIUC, his work lets AI systems understand and reason across text, images and beyond.Shengjia ZhaoZhao is the co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and o4-mini. A leader in data synthesis and AI safety, Zhao's research continues to shape how modern AI models learn and behave responsibly.- Ends