Meta announces AI Superintelligence Lab called MSL

The elusive race for AI talent, AI Infrastructure supremacy and vague post AGI treasures. 💰👑 Home burglary at OpenAI cause them to pause on 80 hour work weeks.

Recently Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook, now called Meta) announced the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be run by some of his company’s most recent hires. Meta poaching especially OpenAI talent is one of the most interesting things in AI in the summer of 2025 as an event, because it brings back attention to the importance of AI talent.

While Sam Altman had publically gone on a podcast of his brother downplaying the poaching blitz by Meta, that isn’t the entire story. Especially when it comes to the importance of Chinese American AI Researchers. Wired and others reported on how one remaining employee publicly broke down. “Not too many people outside the company know how talented and hardcore they are,” Cheng Lu, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, posted on X on June 29, commenting on a post announcing that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, or “Zuck,” had poached four elite Chinese researchers.

He continued: “Such a huge loss to OpenAI and I feel really disappointed that the leadership didn’t keep them.”

The post, which was later deleted, quickly went viral. It revealed internally how important and well-regarded some of the poached talent from Meta really is inside of OpenAI, who have been losing talent to Anthropic and Thinking Machines Lab already for quite some time.

How talented were those lost to Meta from OpenAI exactly? 🤔

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A lot of top AI researchers are financially set.

“A lot of the early OpenAI people have achieved financial independence already. At some point, people are seeing a $25 million offer, and they’re just like, ‘Well, after tax it’s half that.’”

So actually in the AI mercenary vs. missionary debate, it’s often foreign born immigrants who are more easily lured by a big payday like Meta has offered AI researchers.

• Every single one of the 11 Meta superintelligence hires is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad.

• 7 are from China, 1 India, 1 Australia, 1 UK, 1 South Africa. They are highly educated: 8 are PhD or PhD dropouts in the US.

• Immigration is key to US AI innovation. 64% of the founding members of MSL are Chinese born Researchers.

The poaching episode by Meta on OpenAI still has to go down as one of the pivotal moments of the AI talent wars in early Generate AI history: the TikToker Zauey summarizes it well:

• But how has OpenAI reacted internally?

• What’s going to be the leadership structure at this new Meta Superintelligence Lab?

• Read the entire MSL Memo.

• Is the cost of AI talent going to skyrocket after the emergence of this new AI research lab?

• Who exactly forms the new lab with the crazy signing bonuses?

• What are the sorts of organizations where retention of AI talent is likely to be higher? Who have advantages over labs how don’t have good retention.

• What will this new state-of-the-art world class AI research lab actually be working on?