Former OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal has officially joined Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), underlining Meta’s ambition to compete with leaders like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind in the race for artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Bansal, an IIT Kanpur alumnus with degrees in mathematics and statistics and a PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, brings deep expertise in meta-learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. His career blends rigorous academia and industry experience across major tech firms.
Bansal’s professional journey began in 2012 as an analyst with Accenture Management Consulting in Gurugram. He later worked at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore as a research assistant, focusing on Bayesian modeling and inference. Subsequent internships at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI honed his skills in deep learning for NLP, knowledge graphs, and reinforcement learning. During his PhD at UMass Amherst, he continued to explore deep learning for NLP as a graduate research assistant.
In 2022, Bansal joined OpenAI full-time and collaborated with co-founder Ilya Sutskever on reinforcement learning for reasoning. He helped co-create OpenAI’s first AI reasoning model, o1, which became a key foundation for ChatGPT’s internal reasoning capabilities.
MSL, launched by Mark Zuckerberg this Monday, aims to develop AGI and is co-led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. According to Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, Meta has aggressively recruited top AI talent—often offering packages valued at up to $300 million over four years. While details of Bansal’s contract have not been disclosed, sources say it likely includes substantial stock and advanced compute access.
These competition-driven salaries have drawn scrutiny. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman noted Meta’s attempts to entice his team with “$100 million signing bonuses,” but added that “none of our best people” had accepted them. Still, Bansal’s move, along with at least three other OpenAI departures, suggests otherwise. Other AI researchers reportedly joining Meta include Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai, Jack Rae, and Johan Schalkwyk.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone has downplayed claims of inflated pay packages, but insiders believe Bansal’s recruitment aligns with a targeted effort to accelerate AGI research. With no public AI reasoning model yet in Meta’s toolkit, Bansal’s appointment is expected to significantly advance their development of reasoning-driven large language models, potentially rivaling OpenAI’s o3 or DeepSeek’s R1.
This move cements MSL’s growing reputation as a hub for elite AI research and signals Meta’s serious intent to disrupt the AGI landscape.
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