Meta’s New AI Team Revealed: 8 Chinese Experts from Tsinghua, Peking University, Zhejiang University Lead the Charge}
Meta has aggressively recruited top AI talent, including 8 Chinese researchers from prestigious universities, forming a powerful team to advance its AI research and development efforts.
Recently, Meta’s aggressive talent recruitment has shocked the industry. Mark Zuckerberg appears determined to make a major comeback in AI, investing heavily to attract top-tier experts.
Among the new recruits are researchers from OpenAI and senior engineers from Google, all influential in their respective fields. Today, with the exposure of an internal memo, the scope of Meta’s AI talent war becomes clearer. Refer to this article.
From this memo, we see Meta has recruited 11 top researchers. Here, we highlight the Chinese scholars Meta has brought in.
Alexandr Wang
Alexandr Wang, also known as Wang Tao, is the founder and CEO of Scale AI. After joining Meta, he now leads the newly established "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL).
Born in 1997 to parents who are physicists, Wang has been passionate about math and programming since childhood. He was selected for the US Math Olympiad training camp in 2013, the US Physics Team in 2014, and was a finalist in the USACO in 2012 and 2013. During his youth, he also worked as a software engineer on Quora.
He briefly studied at MIT and worked as an algorithm developer at Hudson River Trading. In 2016, he dropped out to found Scale AI, focusing on data annotation and model evaluation for AI applications. Scale AI quickly grew into one of Silicon Valley’s largest AI companies, making Wang a billionaire and dubbed "the next Elon Musk."
Zuckerberg highly praises Wang:
"I believe he is one of the most outstanding peer entrepreneurs, with a clear understanding of the historic significance of superintelligence. As co-founder and CEO, he has built ScaleAI into a rapidly growing company, participating in nearly all leading industry models."
Shuchao Bi
Bi Shuchao graduated from Zhejiang University’s Department of Mathematics and later obtained a Master’s degree in Statistics from UC Berkeley, now a PhD candidate in Mathematics.
While at OpenAI, he co-created GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini, and served as the head of multimodal training. His research focuses on building stronger, more robust foundational models, advancing scientific and technological frontiers, and boosting productivity through tool use and self-play agents.
Before OpenAI, he led YouTube Shorts at Google, a key strategic product for next-generation creators and audiences, and worked at Google for six years, optimizing deep learning models for advertising, generating over a hundred million dollars in incremental revenue.
Huiwen Chang
Chang graduated from Tsinghua University’s School of Information, and earned a PhD from Princeton University. She interned at Adobe in Seattle in 2015, received a Microsoft scholarship in 2016, and later joined Google as a senior research scientist. At Google, she contributed to the creation of MaskGIT and Muse architectures for image generation.
Ji Lin
Ji Lin graduated from Tsinghua University and completed his Master’s and PhD at MIT. He has interned or worked at Adobe Research, OmniML, and NVIDIA Research. During his time at OpenAI, he helped develop o3/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, and the Operator inference framework.
Shengjia Zhao
Zhao Shengjia joined OpenAI in June 2022. He graduated from Tsinghua University and earned his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, receiving the ICLR 2022 Outstanding Paper Award. He participated in creating ChatGPT, GPT-4, and other flagship projects, and served as the head of the synthetic data team at OpenAI.
Hongyu Ren
Ren Hongyu previously worked as a research scientist at OpenAI. He joined in July 2023, having previously worked at Apple and Google. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s degree from Peking University, with scholarships from Baidu, Apple, and Masason Foundation.
Jiahui Yu
Yu Jiahui joined OpenAI in October 2023 as the head of the perception team. He previously led the perception team at Google DeepMind and was involved in the Gemini multimodal system. He graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China’s Youth Class in Computer Science and earned his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Finally, Shengjia Zhao, who contributed to ChatGPT, GPT-4/4.1/o3, and other projects, previously served as the head of the synthetic data team at OpenAI. His background includes a PhD from Stanford and a Bachelor’s from Tsinghua University.