Meta's high-stakes bet on "superintelligence" is showing early cracks.
At least eight employees, including researchers, engineers, and a senior product leader, have left the company less than two months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a brand new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) aimed at bringing "personal superintelligence" to everyone.
The departing employees are mostly veterans who helped build some of Meta's core AI infrastructure, along with some newer hires lured by Zuckerberg's pitch to join MSL.
"Some attrition is normal for any organization of this size. Most of these employees had been with the company for years, and we wish them the best," a Meta spokesperson said.
The wave of exits comes as Zuckerberg has poured billions of dollars into closing the gap with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. To staff the new superintelligence division, Meta has reportedly dangled compensation packages with hundreds of millions of dollars while scooping up talent from places like OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
The arrival of lavishly paid newcomers has sparked tensions and threats of desertion inside Meta's sprawling AI operations, particularly among veteran staff who joined before the big superintelligence push.
Here are some of the Meta AI employees who left the company this month.
Some longtime Meta veterans are leaving
Bert Maher, who spent 12 years at Meta and was deeply involved in building some of its most important AI tools, left earlier this week to join Anthropic. At Meta, Maher helped to develop PyTorch, an open-source software that has become one of the most widely used tools for training and testing AI systems. He also worked on Triton, a programming language and compiler for making AI models run more efficiently. In a post on X, Maher said that he was excited to make Claude, Anthropic's AI chatbot, "even faster." Maher declined to comment.
Another Meta veteran, Tony Liu, announced his departure on LinkedIn after more than eight years. According to his LinkedIn profile, Liu managed teams working on PyTorch GPU systems, which are key to training and running Meta's large AI models. Liu, who didn't respond to a request for comment, plans to launch a newsletter offering insights into building and scaling AI systems, his LinkedIn post said.
Chi-Hao Wu, an AI and machine learning specialist, announced earlier this month that he was leaving Meta after more than five years to become chief AI officer at Memories.ai, a startup that uses AI to analyze videos and other visuals.
Wu told Business Insider that some Meta AI workers felt work was unstable at times due to constant reorganizations.
"Speaking generally and not for myself, a lot of people in the AI team maybe feel things are too dynamic," he said. "There were a lot of organizational changes — actually, my manager changed several times."
Meta has tinkered with its AI division repeatedly this year, most recently dissolving one team and creating four new ones, according to an internal memo. Meta's communications chief Andy Stone has criticized press reports about Meta's reorganizations as "navel gazing."
Other recent exits include Aram Markosyan, a research scientist who spent more than four years at Meta working on safety and fairness for large AI models and features for Meta's smart glasses. It's unclear where Markosyan, who didn't respond to a request for comment, is headed next.
From Meta to OpenAI
Some former Meta AI employees will head to OpenAI, the company's biggest rival in the race to build advanced AI systems.
Chaya Nayak, who had been at Meta for nearly nine years and most recently served as director of product management for generative AI, announced that she was joining OpenAI to work on special initiatives. During her tenure, Nayak led election transparency work, data sharing initiatives, and helped oversee the development of Meta's Llama family of large language models.
Afroz Mohiuddin, a senior staff engineer who joined Meta last year after more than 14 years at Google, left earlier this month to become a member of OpenAI's technical staff. Mohiuddin declined to comment.
Some recent Meta hires left, too
The recent departures mostly come from the ranks of employees who joined Meta well before it announced its high-profile superintelligence push, though some also include recent hires.
Wired reported that two researchers, Avi Verma and Ethan Knight, left MSL after less than a month and returned to OpenAI, where they had previously worked. Verma left MSL before his start date, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider. Verma and Knight did not respond to requests for comment.
"During an intense recruiting process, some people will decide to stay in their current job rather than starting a new one. That's normal," the Meta spokesperson said of the new hires.
Rishabh Agarwal, who joined Meta from Google DeepMind in April, decided to leave after just five months. In a post on X, Agarwal praised Meta's "talent and compute density" and said that he wanted to take "a different kind of risk."
According to a person familiar with the matter, Agarwal is joining Periodic Labs, a new AI startup founded by former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers that is using AI to study and discover new physical materials.
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