Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday, he plans to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into artificial intelligence compute infrastructure to build several massive data centres for superintelligence. In the process, he has come up with a war room of modern times, packed with top engineers who specialise in AI.

Heading the pack is Alexandr Wang, 28, Meta’s new chief AI officer. The New York Times reported on Monday that some of the top engineers of the newly formed “superintelligence lab” are discussing developing a closed model.

Zuckerberg is not being miserly when it comes to computing power and talent, besides a lot of energy, needed in the AI race. In April, Meta said it could spend as much as $72 billion on capital expenditures this year, with a focus on AI and the data centres used to train and run the models. Unlike his rivals, who are raising large funding rounds, Meta’s advertising business is solid enough to finance its investment in the AI space.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is offering as much as a nine-figure pay package to hire top researchers from companies like OpenAI, Google, Apple and Anthropic. Last month, Meta invested $14.3 billion in the AI startup Scale AI, which was founded and led by Wang. Under the deal, Meta took a 49 per cent stake in the company, and Wang and a team of top Scale employees joined Meta in leadership roles. Here is a look at some of the names that will help Meta in its superintelligence quest.

Trapit Bansal

Bansal pioneered RL on chain of thought and is the co-creator of o-series models at OpenAI. He has also interned at various places, like Microsoft Research Montreal (meta-learning NLP), Google Research (knowledge graph reasoning) and OpenAI (worked on multi-agent reinforcement learning and meta learning). Bansal has studied mathematics and statistics at IIT Kanpur and has a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He also completed his PhD in Computer Science from the same university.

Ruoming Pang

Pang is a top engineer who was integral to the Apple Foundation Models project, which is at the heart of Apple Intelligence features that include email and web article summaries. Pang joined Apple in 2021 after working with Alphabet. The people who primarily run Apple’s overall AI strategy are Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who helped create the Apple Vision Pro headset and now leads engineering for Siri. John Giannandrea, senior vice-president of machine learning and AI strategy, is also there.

Nat Friedman and Alexandr Wang

A few days ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the new “superintelligence team”. Wang, earlier the CEO of Scale AI, is now Meta’s chief AI officer. He’s accompanied by Friedman, former GitHub CEO. Together, they will lead Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Before co-leading MSL, Friedman served on the Meta Advisory Group.

Daniel Gross

The former CEO of AI startup Safe Superintelligence will lead the AI products division at Meta. Earlier, he was a tech investor with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and had co-founded the startup Cue, a search engine that was acquired by Apple in 2013. He was also a partner at Y Combinator.

Shuchao Bi

He joined OpenAI in 2024 after more than a decade at YouTube and Google. He has worked on YouTube Shorts and has built multi-stage deep learning models to optimise Google Ads performance. He is co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini, according to a memo circulated by Zuckerberg. At a recent lecture at Columbia Engineering, he said to reach AGI, “we need fundamentally better data, especially utility-aligned data, and more efficient learning algorithms”.

Huiwen Chang

She joined OpenAI in 2023 after being a research scientist at Google for more than four years. Chang was integral in designing GPT-4o’s image generation features and OpenAI’s multimodal model. At Google Research, she came up with the MaskGIT and Muse architectures, both of which are important in the area of text-to-image synthesis.

Ji Lin

After joining OpenAI in 2023, he worked towards building advanced multimodal reasoning systems and helped build o3/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5 and 4o-imagegen.

Joel Pobar

Formerly at Anthropic where he oversaw infrastructure and inference pipelines for large language models, he also worked at Meta for about 11 years, working on HHVM, Hack, Flow, Redex, performance tooling, and machine learning.

Jack Rae

A pre-training technical lead for Gemini and led reasoning for Gemini 2.5, at DeepMind he was important to early large language model projects, including Gopher and Chinchilla.

Hongyu Ren

His LinkedIn profile says he joined OpenAI in 2023, working on multiple o‑series and GPT‑4o models. He helped lead post-training efforts for the ChatGPT maker’s most advanced reasoning models. Ren has also been a research intern at Apple.

Johan Schalkwyk

The former Google Fellow was an early contributor to the Sesame project and was the technical lead for Maya. He has a deep background in AI research and development that has influenced foundational advancements in machine learning frameworks and AI technologies. He has joined Meta Superintelligence Labs as a Voice Lead, according to his LinkedIn page.

Pei Sun

Sun’s work involves post-training, coding, and reasoning for the Gemini project at Google DeepMind. Earlier, he developed the last two generations of perception models for Waymo while his current focus is on enhancing reasoning and real-world application capabilities in advanced AI systems.

Jiahui Yu

The co-creator of o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o joined OpenAI in 2023. Previously, he led the perception team at OpenAI, and co-led multimodal at Gemini.

Shengjia Zhao

At OpenAI, he led synthetic data initiatives, focusing on improving the diversity and quality of training data. He co-created ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models, 4.1 and o3.

Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai

The three of them were all working at OpenAI’s Zurich office. Their departure from the ChatGPT maker was first confirmed by the Wall Street Journal. Kolesnikov has a master’s degree in computational and applied mathematics from Lomonosov Moscow State University and a PhD in machine learning and computer vision from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Zhai has previously been at Google DeepMind while Beyer previously worked with Google DeepMind before joining OpenAI.