Meta’s AI lab is stacked with Chinese talent, drawing attention back home

Meta Platforms’ announcement that several prominent Chinese names working in artificial intelligence (AI) would be joining the company has triggered an outpouring of admiration back home, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg races to fill his new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) with top industry talent.

Zuckerberg announced the formation of MSL in a memo on Monday, tasking it with developing Meta’s next-generation models, and emphasised the company’s vision of delivering “personal superintelligence” accessible to everyone.

Seven of the 11 publicly listed hires at the lab – not including former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who were tapped to lead the unit – are from China: Bi Shuchao, Chang Huiwen, Lin Ji, Ren Hongyu, Sun Pei, Yu Jiahui and Zhao Shengjia.

Each of them is a graduate of prestigious Chinese universities including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and the University of Science and Technology of China. They all went on to pursue further studies and careers in the US.

The influx of Chinese talent into Meta’s new AI unit has sparked widespread discussion in the country’s tech industry, which highlighted the high concentration of mainland talent working in AI globally. That development was pointed out in May by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who said at the Hill & Valley Forum in Washington that “50 per cent of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese”, which should “play into how we think about the game”.

Meta’s aggressive hiring tactics have also heightened tensions with rival OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman said on a recent podcast that Meta offered signing bonuses as high as US$100 million to lure away potential recruits from the start-up. News outlet Wired reported that Altman criticised Meta in a memo to OpenAI employees.

South China Morning Post