The Asian brains forging AI models at OpenAI, Google, Meta

The hottest transfer market news this summer isn’t just coming out of European football clubs like Real Madrid or Manchester City. 

It’s also from the wave of AI talent being poached between top labs, kicked off by Meta offering signing bonuses rumored to reach US$100 million to lure AI scientists from OpenAI.

Some of Meta’s notable new hires who previously worked at OpenAI include Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT; Trapit Bansal, who worked on the o-series reasoning models; and Huiwen Chang, one of the developers behind GPT-4o’s image generation feature.

With new AI models now getting the same level of attention as iPhone launches, the scientists behind them are making headlines. It’s no longer just the founders like OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

That’s why Tech in Asia has compiled a list of Asian contributors to some of the most well-known AI models, including OpenAI’s o1, Google’s Gemini 2.5, and Meta’s LLama 3.

Today’s model builders could be tomorrow’s rising startup founders. They’re also prime targets for Asia’s corporations looking for leaders to drive AI initiatives.

See also: Movers and shakers in Southeast Asia’s genAI space 

Of the contributors we found working on these models, most of them come from China.