Former OpenAI Perception Lead Jiahui Yu Joins Meta’s AGI Team

Meta Platforms has significantly expanded its new Superintelligence team by recruiting Jiahui Yu , a former perception lead at OpenAI, along with three other prominent researchers: Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren.

Yu co-led the development of OpenAI’s o3, o4‑mini, GPT‑4.1, and GPT‑4o , and previously helmed the perception team responsible for enabling models to interpret multimodal inputs like images, audio, and sensor data. His prior work at Google DeepMind—in multimodal learning for Google’s Gemini—further underscores his technical credentials.

This hiring comes amid an aggressive talent acquisition campaign by Meta, which has reportedly offered compensation packages up to $100 million over four years to secure top-tier AI researchers. The move is part of a broader strategy to close the gap with competitors like OpenAI and DeepMind in the race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) .

Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs is led by Alexandr Wang (Chief AI Officer) and Nat Friedman, and is focused on accelerating next-gen reasoning models and multimodal innovation. Yu and the other hires are expected to anchor Meta’s push into frontier AI capabilities, particularly around GPT scale models and multimodal systems .

M.A.