Who is Trapit Bansal, ex-OpenAI researcher who may join Meta’s AI team soon

Only a few days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that Meta was attempting to steal its talent but was unsuccessful, a recent report claimed that Meta had hired Trapit Bansal, a top AI researcher who was formerly with OpenAI, to join its “superintelligence” team. This coincides with rumours that Meta is attempting to acquire a number of AI startups, including the $32 billion AI startup founded by Ilya Sutskever of OpenAI, in order to assemble its ideal AI team.

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Trapit Bansal, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, holds dual degrees in mathematics and statistics before pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He researched meta-learning and natural language processing, which are essential for the next generation of AI systems.

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Bansal, as per his LinkedIn post, has left OpenAI in June 2025. However, his next role has not been publicly announced at the moment. But the reports suggest that he is set to join the same Meta AI division that has already attracted various popular names from sector-including three other former OpenAI researchers and former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.

At OpenAI, Bansal reportedly played an important role in developing the company’s first AI reasoning model dubbed o1. The reports also claim that Bansal also played an important role in shaping OpenAI’s roadmap towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) and has been regarded as one of the foundation figures.

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Now, with Meta, Bansal is said to be working on Meta’s AI reasoning, which is currently lagging behind rivals such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind. According to reports, he has extensive experience architecting systems capable of planning and reasoning, which could enable Meta to launch its flagship reasoning model, potentially rivaling OpenAI’s upcoming “o3” model in complexity and capability.

The reports also stated that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also involved in the recruitment and building of the AI team. The report also stated that Meta is even offering pay packages of over USD 100 million. However, former OpenAI staff have publicly denied getting such offers. But the intention seems to be clear, Meta is aggressively building a formidable team to fast track AI goals.

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Ashish Singh

Ashish Singh is the Chief Copy Editor at Digit. He's been wrangling tech jargon since 2020 (Times Internet, Jagran English '22). When not policing commas, he's likely fueling his gadget habit with coffee, strategising his next virtual race, or plotting a road trip to test the latest in-car tech. He speaks fluent Geek. View Full Profile