The AI talent war just got another major casualty. Meta has successfully poached Yang Song, who led OpenAI's strategic explorations team, to become research principal of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Song started earlier this month, marking the latest high-profile defection in Silicon Valley's fierce competition for AI expertise.
Meta just landed another major win in Silicon Valley's AI talent wars. Yang Song, who spent three years leading OpenAI's strategic explorations team, has jumped ship to become research principal at Meta Superintelligence Labs, according to multiple sources reporting to WIRED. He's now reporting to Shengjia Zhao, another OpenAI alum who's been running Meta's buzzy superintelligence effort since July.
The move caps off what's been an aggressive summer hiring spree for Mark Zuckerberg. Meta has now poached at least 11 top researchers from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic since June, signaling just how serious the company is about winning the race to artificial general intelligence.
Song brings some serious AI credentials to Meta's growing research empire. While still a Stanford PhD student, he developed breakthrough techniques that helped inform the development of OpenAI's DALL-E 2 image generation model. At OpenAI, his research focused on improving models' ability to process large, complex datasets across different modalities - exactly the kind of multimodal AI that's becoming crucial for the next generation of AI systems.
But Song's hire also highlights the complex web of relationships driving AI talent movement. Both he and his new boss Zhao attended Tsinghua University in Beijing as undergraduates, then worked under the same Stanford advisor, Stefano Ermon, while pursuing their PhDs. It's a reminder that in AI's tight-knit research community, personal relationships often matter as much as corporate recruiting budgets.
The timing couldn't be more significant. Zhao himself nearly returned to OpenAI earlier this summer, even going as far as signing employment documents before Meta convinced him to stay by formalizing his role as chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. In a July Threads post, Zuckerberg revealed that while Zhao had "cofounded the lab" and "been our lead scientist from day one," the company decided to make his leadership official.