AI researcher Luke Metz has left OpenAI to join Meta's Superintelligence Labs, according to reporting by Axios. Metz begins at Meta this week and will report directly to Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.
Metz has been a prominent figure in frontier LLM post-training and alignment research. During his initial tenure at OpenAI, his experimental research preview project served as the core prototype that led to the launch of ChatGPT. In late 2024, Metz departed OpenAI to become a founding team member at Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, before returning to OpenAI in January 2026.
The hire represents another high-profile recruitment for Meta's Superintelligence Labs, which was formed after Meta completed a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and appointed Wang as Chief AI Officer. Meta has since recruited several senior technical leaders and researchers across reinforcement learning, post-training optimization, and synthetic data generation from peer labs including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Thinking Machines Lab.
The move comes amid continuous talent mobility across frontier AI organizations, where specialized expertise in large-scale pre-training stability, reasoning architectures, and agentic reinforcement learning remains concentrated among a small cohort of veteran researchers.
