Seven of 11 publicly listed recruits at the new Meta Superintelligence Labs graduated from prestigious Chinese universities before moving to US,writes Wency Chenin.
Meta Platforms’ announcement that several prominent Chinese names working in artificial intelligence (AI) would be joining the company has triggered an outpouring of admiration back home, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg races to fill his new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) with top industry talent.
Zuckerberg announced the formation of MSL in a memo on Monday, tasking it with developing Meta’s next-generation models, and emphasised the company’s vision of delivering “personal superintelligence” accessible to everyone.
Seven of the 11 publicly listed hires at the lab – not including former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who were tapped to lead the unit – are from China: Bi Shuchao, Chang Huiwen, Lin Ji, Ren Hongyu, Sun Pei, Yu Jiahui and Zhao Shengjia.
Each of them is a graduate of prestigious Chinese universities including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and the University of Science and Technology of China. They all went on to pursue further studies and careers in the US.
The influx of Chinese talent into Meta’s new AI unit has sparked widespread discussion in the country’s tech industry, which highlighted the high concentration of mainland talent working in AI globally. That development was pointed out in May by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who said at the Hill & Valley Forum in Washington that “50 per cent of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese”, which should “play into how we think about the game”.
Meta’s aggressive hiring tactics have also heightened tensions with rival OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman said on a recent podcast that Meta offered signing bonuses as high as US$100 million to lure away potential recruits from the start-up. News outlet Wired reported that Altman criticised Meta in a memo to OpenAI employees.
“There will always be some mercenaries,” Altman reportedly wrote. “Missionaries will beat mercenaries.” He also hinted at a re-evaluation of the company’s compensation.
Among Meta’s new hires, four graduated from Beijing’s Tsinghua University, sometimes called China’s equivalent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Chang Huiwen.
Chang Huiwen graduated from the Yao Class programme at Tsinghua’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences – an elite computer science programme founded by Turing Award laureate Andrew Yao Qizhi. She earned her PhD from Princeton University, with a focus on image processing.
Chang interned at Adobe and Facebook before being awarded a Microsoft fellowship in 2016. After a stint at Google starting in 2019, she moved to OpenAI in June 2023, co-developing GPT-4o’s advanced image generation capabilities.
Lin Ji.
Lin Ji completed his undergraduate studies at Tsinghua in 2018 before going on to earn his PhD at MIT in 2023. He completed internships at Google, Adobe and Nvidia before joining OpenAI in November 2023 to specialise in multimodal reasoning and synthetic data.
Sun Pei.
Tsinghua alumnus Sun Pei earned a master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University, ending his pursuit of a PhD before beginning his career at Google in 2011. He briefly joined Chinese data infrastructure firm Alluxio before moving to Google’s Waymo in 2017.
Sun later became a principal researcher at Google’s DeepMind, playing a critical role in developing Gemini AI models, particularly in areas such as post-training and reasoning.
Zhao Shengjia.
Zhao Shengjia earned his bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua in 2016 and completed his PhD at Stanford University in 2022, when he immediately joined OpenAI. Zhao previously led the synthetic data programme at the start-up and was a core contributor to landmark products including ChatGPT, the GPT-4 model and various mini-models.
Bi Shuchao.
Bi Shuchao – who will specialise in reinforcement learning, post-training and AI agents in his new role, according to his social media profile – completed his bachelor’s in mathematics at Zhejiang University, in the eastern province’s capital, Hangzhou. He went on to earn a master’s and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bi began his career at Google in 2013, optimising Google Ads through deep learning models. He later co-founded YouTube Shorts, a product meant to help the platform compete with ByteDance’s TikTok. He joined OpenAI in May 2024 as head of multimodal post-training, contributing to GPT-4o’s voice mode and o4-mini models.
Ren Hongyu
Ren Hongyu graduated from Peking University in 2018 and completed his computer science PhD at Stanford in 2023. While in school, he interned at Microsoft, Nvidia, Google and Apple. He joined OpenAI after graduation, contributing to key AI models and leading a team focused on post-training.
Yu Jiahui.
Yu Jiahui is a graduate of the Special Class for Gifted Young programme at the University of Science and Technology of China, an institution run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in eastern Anhui province. He went on to earn his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Yu’s experience includes work at Microsoft, Megvii, Adobe, Snap, Baidu, Nvidia and Google. At Google’s DeepMind, he contributed to Gemini development before joining OpenAI in October 2023 to lead the perception team.
Other members who are non-Chinese staff but still not Americans are;
Trapit Bansal: He previously worked at OpenAI and completed his PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst after graduating from IIT Kanpur in India. He is known for advancing reinforcement learning in AI reasoning systems and co-creating the o-series models.
Joel Pobar: With experience at Anthropic and Meta, he studied in Australia and built core infrastructure for HHVM, Hack, and PyTorch — tools that support large-scale AI systems.
Jack Rae: A UK native with degrees from CMU and UCL, he previously led large model pretraining at DeepMind. He helped develop Gopher, Chinchilla, and Gemini 2.5.
Johan Schalkwyk: A University of Pretoria (South Africa) graduate and former Google Fellow, he was an early contributor to Google’s speech technology and led the Maya team.
Source: SCMP, Economists