Meta’s 2025 hiring wave dominates frontier-lab researcher movement
A live-web scan found 50 publicly reported direct moves since January 2025. The largest single corridor was OpenAI to Meta with 13 researchers; Google DeepMind was the largest source overall across the selected reports.
50
reported researcher moves
13
OpenAI → Meta, largest route
23
moves into Meta
20
months covered
Where researchers went
Ribbon width = number of reported moves; source labs at left, destination labs at right
moveslabs
What stands out
01
Meta was the main destination. It received 23 of the 50 researchers, including 13 from OpenAI and eight from Google DeepMind.
02
Google DeepMind was the largest talent source. Eighteen selected moves originated there, chiefly to Meta and Anthropic.
03
The flow partially reversed. Meta also lost researchers to OpenAI and Anthropic, while Thinking Machines Lab sent four people back to OpenAI in 2026.
04
Movement accelerated beyond the 2025 Meta wave. High-profile 2026 moves included Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and John Jumper to Anthropic.
Reported moves
| Researcher | Left | Joined | Approx. date | Source |
|---|
Method: live-web search run 20 Aug 2026 across reporting from Reuters, TechCrunch, CNBC, Wired, The Verge, Business Insider and other outlets. Included named researchers or research/technical leaders moving directly between frontier-model labs; dates are announcement or reported move dates and can be approximate. Duplicate lab names were normalized.