Former OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal has officially joined Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, a team dedicated to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) as part of Meta’s broader push to rival OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, said a report by India Today.
An Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur alumnus with dual degrees in mathematics and statistics, Bansal went on to earn a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he specialised in meta-learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP). His career combines strong academic foundations with practical experience at some of the world’s leading tech firms.
Bansal began his professional journey in 2012 as an analyst with Accenture Management Consulting in Gurugram. He later spent over two years at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, as a research assistant, focusing on Bayesian modelling and inference techniques.
Over time, he interned at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, working on deep learning for NLP, knowledge graphs, and reinforcement learning. At UMass Amherst, he also served as a graduate research assistant, conducting research in deep learning for natural language tasks.
In 2022, Bansal joined OpenAI full-time as a member of the technical staff, where he collaborated with Co-founder Ilya Sutskever on reinforcement learning for reasoning. He played a key role in developing OpenAI’s first AI reasoning model, o1, which was a turning point in the evolution of ChatGPT’s internal reasoning capabilities.
Trapit Bansal’s new role at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) marks a significant addition to Meta’s ambitious AGI efforts. Officially launched by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, MSL is spearheading Meta’s drive to develop AGI, and is Co-led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
According to reports from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, Meta is actively recruiting top-tier AI talent from rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind, reportedly offering compensation packages as high as $300 million over four years. While the terms of Bansal’s deal remain undisclosed, industry speculation points to a lucrative package, likely including stock-based incentives and access to vast resources.
These aggressive hiring moves have stirred tension across the AI industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently accused Meta of trying to take in employees with "$100 million signing bonuses," though he claimed that "none of our best people" had accepted.
However, Bansal’s departure, alongside at least three other OpenAI researchers, suggests otherwise. Other high-profile researchers who have reportedly joined Meta include Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai, Jack Rae, and Johan Schalkwyk.
Bansal’s recruitment could prove pivotal for Meta, which currently lacks a publicly released AI reasoning model. His expertise in building systems that can reason, plan, and learn is expected to accelerate the development of Meta’s next-generation large language models, potentially placing the company in direct competition with OpenAI’s o3 and DeepSeek’s R1.
While Meta spokesperson Andy Stone has downplayed reports of inflated salaries, insiders view Bansal’s appointment as a strategic move to fast-track Meta’s AGI research and close the gap with leading players in the space.