Mark Zuckerberg has poached a high-ranking OpenAI researcher to be the research principal of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Yang Song, who previously led the strategic explorations team at OpenAI, is now reporting to Shengjia Zhao, another OpenAI alum who has overseen the buzzy AI effort since July, according to multiple sources. He started earlier this month.
The move comes after Zuckerberg went on a hiring blitz earlier this summer, bringing in at least 11 top researchers from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.
Song had been at OpenAI since 2022. His research there focused on improving models’ ability to process large, complex datasets across different modalities. While still a graduate student at Stanford University, he developed a breakthrough technique that helped inform the development of OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 image-generation model. Both he and Zhao attended Tsinghua University in Beijing as undergraduates and worked under the same adviser, Stefano Ermon, while pursuing PhDs at Stanford.
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