$100 Million To Quit OpenAI For Meta? All About IIT Alum Trapit Bansal

Trapit Bansal, an Indian-origin researcher, has left OpenAI to join Meta's new superintelligence unit. Mr Bansal confirmed the move on Tuesday in a post on X, writing, "Thrilled to be joining Meta! Superintelligence is now in sight." Reports citing Open AI CEO Sam Altman's comments suggest that Trapit Bansal is among the top notch recruits offered a 100 million dollar joining bonus by Meta.

A graduate of IIT Kanpur, Mr Bansal joined OpenAI in 2022 and made significant contributions to its reinforcement learning efforts and early AI reasoning models. TechCrunch described him as "a highly influential OpenAI researcher."

Who Is Trapit Bansal?

  1. Trapit Bansal is an AI researcher with a background in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. His research areas include natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and meta-learning.
  2. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Statistics from IIT Kanpur. He earned a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He also completed his PhD in Computer Science from the same university.
  3. During his academic years, he held research internship positions at IISc Bengaluru, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
  4. He interned at OpenAI for four months in 2017 during his graduation. Following his internships, his first full-time role was at OpenAI, where he joined as a Member of Technical Staff in January 2022. At OpenAI, he worked on reinforcement learning (RL) and reasoning-focused frontier research alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
  5. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr Bansal co-created the model referred to as "01," though further details are not public. 

Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Meta of offering $100 million compensation packages to lure top AI researchers away from OpenAI. In response, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth called the claims "dishonest," saying Altman was exaggerating and implying all recruits were offered such packages, which Bosworth denied.

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