Meta hired Luke Metz seven months after OpenAI hired him back

Luke Metz has joined Meta Superintelligence Labs, seven months after rejoining OpenAI.

A source familiar with the matter confirmed the hire to Axios. Ina Fried reported it on Monday.

Metz starts this week and reports to Alexandr Wang, who runs Meta’s AI effort.

Three labs in under a year

Metz left OpenAI in 2024 for Thinking Machines, the lab Mira Murati founded after leaving the same company.

He rejoined OpenAI in January. He has now left again, for Meta, in August.

That is three moves between frontier labs inside eight months, two of them involving OpenAI. Axios called him the latest researcher to jump between rival labs in the talent war.

An anonymous account got there first

The move surfaced on X before any newsroom had it. An account posting as Arfur Grok said on Friday that Metz had left OpenAI, then said on Saturday that he had joined Meta.

Axios credited the account directly, noting it has accurately flagged a number of recent AI moves.

That is now a working part of the beat. Hobbyists watch profile changes at the frontier labs, and the trade press confirms afterwards.

What he is joining

Superintelligence Labs is the unit Meta built around Wang. Mark Zuckerberg set out its purpose in an essay this month, pitching what he calls personal superintelligence, a document readers took several different ways.

The lab has shipped steadily. It launched Muse Image in July, the first model built under Wang, and has debuted several more since.

One of them, Muse Spark, hacked a real company during a safety test in August.

What Meta paid to get Wang

The recruiting spree started with Scale AI. Meta paid billions for a stake in the data-labelling firm, and the deal brought its chief executive across to run Meta’s AI work.

Scale AI has since appointed a cloud salesman as its own chief executive and turned towards enterprise business.

It is renting models at the same time

Meta pays Microsoft hundreds of millions a year to rent AI models through Azure.

So the company hiring frontier researchers by the handful is also buying access to somebody else’s.

Where Metz came from

Thinking Machines is Murati’s lab, staffed heavily by former OpenAI researchers.

It released Inkling in July, a large open-weight model the company conceded was not the best available.

Murati had spent 18 months out of public view before resurfacing last year with a warning about AI governance and a product nobody expected.

OpenAI has been losing people all year

Brad Lightcap left this month after eight years, to start something of his own.

The company disbanded the team assessing catastrophic model risks in August. It lost two sales leaders to Salesforce inside a single week.

A researcher left in July to build an AI drug discovery startup that had raised $2bn before it had a name.

Nobody is standing still

The churn runs across the frontier. Google named a new head of Gemini 4 this month, and both of Gemini’s co-leads quit the same day.

Chinese AI and chip firms have started handing out equity specifically to stop engineers walking out.

Taiwan is investigating 17 Chinese companies for poaching its chip talent.

The reaction was mostly bafflement

Metz came from Google to OpenAI, left to help start Thinking Machines, returned in January and is already out again, the developer Peter Dedene wrote on X. What did he see, Dedene asked.

Others were blunter about the incentives. One poster suggested OpenAI now has a six-month cliff. Another wondered whether Metz is negotiating a fresh vesting schedule every quarter.

Not everyone was cynical. One called him world-class, and the hire masterful.

What the numbers are not

No source has put a figure on Metz’s package.

Speculation on X ran into the billions, on the basis that Meta has previously made offers above $1bn to AI researchers who turned them down. Nobody has reported what he was actually offered.

Nor has anyone reported what he was on at OpenAI, or what he would have forfeited by leaving in month seven.

What has not been said

Meta has not said what Metz will work on inside Superintelligence Labs.

OpenAI has not commented on his departure. Metz has not said publicly why he left, either in January or now.

Neither company has confirmed when he formally resigned, though the account that broke it put the exit on Friday and the arrival a day later.