Meta Superintelligence Lab AI Scientist Yu Jiahui Departs to Found Startup

Yu Jiahui, a key figure at Meta's Superintelligence Lab, announced his departure on August 14, 2026, to start a venture. In a social media post, he said that over time he realized there was something of critical importance to humanity's future that few had explored, and he decided to devote all his energy to it, without disclosing the specific direction. In July 2025, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of the Superintelligence Lab in a memo, listing 11 key talents, including seven Chinese researchers. Now, both Yu Jiahui and Pang Ruoming have left.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had previously revealed that Meta made huge offers to OpenAI employees, with some signing bonuses reaching $100 million. A Meta spokesperson clarified in an internal meeting document that not everyone received a $100 million offer; only a few leadership positions came with total compensation of about $100 million. Yu spent one year and two months at Meta, co-founding the TBD lab with Zuckerberg and Meta's Chief AI Officer Wang Tao, focusing on multimodal work. Since April 2026, the team has released Muse Spark, the lab's first native multimodal reasoning model, as well as the image generation model Muse Image and video generation model Muse Video. Several Meta researchers expressed well-wishes in the comments.

Yu Jiahui was born in 1995 in Cixi, Zhejiang. He earned his undergraduate degree from the Special Class for the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China, and later received a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied under Thomas Huang, known as the father of computer vision. He interned at Baidu USA, Nvidia, and Google Brain, and later worked at Google DeepMind and OpenAI. From 2022 to 2023, he was a research scientist and senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, co-leading the Gemini multimodal division and making core contributions to the PaLM-2 architecture. From 2023 to 2025 at OpenAI, he participated in research on o3, o4-mini, and GPT-4.1 as a research lead, and contributed to GPT-4o as a perception technology research lead.

In April 2026, nine months after the lab's founding, Meta released its first model, Muse Spark, which supports tool use, visual chain-of-thought, and multi-agent orchestration. Its intelligence index on the evaluation platform Artificial Analysis rose from 18 to 52. In early July, the lab launched Muse Image and Muse Video. In February 2026, Pang Ruoming, a well-known Chinese AI researcher at Meta, had already moved to OpenAI. In July 2025, Meta offered compensation packages of up to $300 million over four years to recruit AI researchers, with $100 million in the first year, though the spokesperson denied the $100 million signing bonus claim. On February 24, 2026, Meta AI research scientist Zhang Pengchuan announced his departure to join OpenAI, working on world models and robotics.

In 2025, Silicon Valley saw intense talent competition, with Meta, OpenAI, and Apple engaged in a war for top researchers. Zuckerberg recruited leading experts in data preparation, pretraining, and post-training, aiming to launch next-generation model research and reach the technological frontier by 2027. Since April 2026, Meta has rolled out a full suite of multimodal models, but the departure of core figure Yu Jiahui at the moment of concentrated delivery has raised external concerns about the lab's subsequent research progress.