OpenAI’s Wall of Fame Now Featuring Half the Team at Meta’s Billion-Dollar Playground
KEY POINTS
- •OpenAI lost more than seven key researchers to Meta’s Superintelligence Lab during summer 2025 in a major talent transfer.
- •High-level departures included chief people officer Julia Villagra and chief communications officer Hannah Wong after short tenures.
- •OpenAI remains with only two founding members active amid restructuring, while others joined startups or research non-profits.
In a dazzling 2025 talent marathon worthy of a corporate soap opera, OpenAI lost at least seven brilliant researchers — including Jason Wei, Zhiqing Sun, and Hyung Won Chung — to Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, where they reportedly are having 'so much fun building from a clean slate.' Happily recruited with billion-dollar promises by Zuckerberg and Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, the defecting stars include Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT and GPT-4, now Meta’s chief scientist. Meanwhile, OpenAI's exec roster shed its chief people officer Julia Villagra after just 5 months and lost other key figures like chief communications officer Hannah Wong, signaling an AI exodus so dramatic it might require an AI to simply keep up. Also starring: a former Treasury secretary turned board quitter after Epstein emails surfaced, and a VP launching his own AI scientist startup fittingly named Periodic Labs. All said, OpenAI’s down to a duo of founding originals, vividly illustrating that even AI empires suffer from the classic human problem—great talent always wants greener CPU cycles.
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Nothing says ‘We’re the future’ like OpenAI watching half its braintrust jump ship for Meta’s billion-dollar AI sandbox. Who needs stability when you have Zuckerberg’s invite and clean slates?
When Meta invests billions just to poach OpenAI’s best, you know AI teamwork is more like Tinder for tech geniuses.
OpenAI’s new motto: 'Innovate fast, lose faster.' Because nothing screams progress like an army of defections to Mark Zuckerberg.
Source: Businessinsider | Published: 12/26/2025 | Author: Katherine Li
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