Meta’s Superintelligence Lab is active. It’s funded, staffed, and moving fast. As of July 19, the official headcount is 44. Of those, 22 are Chinese nationals. 33 hold PhDs. 31 are core researchers. 17 came from OpenAI. 9 left DeepMind. 6 were pulled from Scale AI. 9 are already working at L8 level or above. 33 are first-generation immigrants. Compensation ranges from $10 million to $100 million per year. These figures aren’t speculative. Multiple hires confirmed the range privately and through leaked internal statements.
Leadership includes Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman. Wang ran Scale AI. Meta paid $14.3 billion to secure a stake and fold the talent in. The roster includes Shengjia Zhao, Trapit Bansal, Ji Lin, Hongyu Ren, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Huiwen Chang, Jack Rae, Pei Sun, Joel Pobar, and Johan Schalkwyk. They helped engineer GPT-4o, Gemini, Claude, Maya and other frontier stacks. Each name is tied to active architecture in AI’s top echelon.
Meta’s capex for 2025 is projected to hit $68 billion. Internal deployments mix MTIA accelerators with H100 clusters. Researchers operate on uncapped compute. The build focus now leans toward new transformer variants and long-context multimodal stacks. Llama 4.1 is running internally. Llama 4.2 is training. But this team’s real mandate is model overhaul. Reasoning, long-term memory, agent design. The goal is system-level intelligence, not chatbot polish.
Hiring decisions were handpicked by Zuckerberg. He reviewed citation databases himself. Offers included signing packages north of $75 million. Some reached $100 million. High-end packages involved equity, residency buyouts, and personal compute assignments. Turnover from competing labs confirmed a direct talent raid.
The China-heavy composition is triggering attention. 50% of the team. The Trump administration is reviewing Meta’s hiring pipeline under national security protocols. Export control agencies flagged multi-pass architecture work that may cross into restricted hardware zones. Meta declined comment. But subpoenas are now being prepared.
Sources:
https://wccftech.com/meta-superintelligence-team-44-members-50-percent-are-from-china/
https://observer.com/2025/07/meta-superintellience-team-members/
https://www.eweek.com/news/meta-superintelligence-labs-hiring-mark-zuckerberg/