The 28-year old Alexandr Wang, an MIT dropout who founded artificial intelligence company Scale in 2016, is now leading Meta’s AI efforts. This isn’t just any other typical Silicon Valley hiring, and most certainly the age has nothing to do with why I am writing about his role in Meta’s AI vision. In the past couple of days, since Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced a major restructuring (this is more substantial than changing the name from Facebook to Meta), the X feed has looked more like how a football club’s feed would, when the transfer window is open to frenetic activity. Anyone who has achieved anything in the AI domain thus far, seems to be joining Meta. And are posting about it. I would presume, for good money too, but I digress.

Trapit Bansal was previously with OpenAI where he co-created the o-series models. Jiahui Yu has also worked at OpenAI where he was part of the core team that created the o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1, and GPT-4o models, and led perception and multimodal efforts. Yu must have worked alongside Ji Lin on these models. Joel Pobar re-joins from Anthropic. Jack Rae joins from Google DeepMind, having worked there on pre-training for the Gemini 2.5 model. As does Pei Sun, where he worked at post-training and reasoning for Gemini models, as well as the Waymo models. These are just some high-profile names. If you think Meta is trying to recreate the Los Galacticos era, akin to the Real Madrid football club in the 2000s, you’d not be off the mark.

Last week on Tech........

© hindustantimes