Since 2025, frontier-lab talent has flowed one way: into Meta’s superintelligence push
Which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025 — who left where, where they went, and when?
A public-source inventory of 32 reported moves across 8 frontier-model organizations, January 2025 through August 2026; each strand below is one researcher.
Ribbon width = moves on the corridor · colour = destination lab · drifting dots are individual researchers in motion (paused if you prefer reduced motion) · hover a ribbon or lab for names and counts
OpenAI → Meta Superintelligence Labs is the single largest corridor: 11 moves between June 2025 and August 2026. wabx.net
Google DeepMind is the biggest net loser — 12 departures across five destinations, including 5 to Meta Superintelligence Labs and 4 to Microsoft AI in a single month, July 2025. eweek.com
Thinking Machines Lab lost 6 people within a year of its founding — 4 to Meta and its two co-founders, Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, back to OpenAI in January 2026; both later moved again. officechai.com
The flow is not entirely one-way: in 2026 OpenAI lost a chip engineer to Anthropic, Noam Shazeer left DeepMind for OpenAI, and John Jumper moved to Anthropic. techspherenews.com
All 32 reported moves
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Source
Best-effort inventory of publicly reported direct transitions between major frontier-model research organizations, scanned 2026-08-29, covering 2025-01 to 2026-08. 32 move rows and 11 origin–destination routes; one row is one reported move, so researchers who moved twice (Barret Zoph, Luke Metz) appear once per move. Month is the reported announcement or start month where available. Private or unannounced personnel changes are not captured; completeness is not claimed.