Social media firm Meta Platforms (META) has hired three more artificial intelligence researchers from Google (GOOGL) DeepMind as CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues his aggressive push to strengthen the company’s AI team. Interestingly, the new hires — Tianhe Yu, Cosmo Du, and Weiyue Wang — previously worked on a version of Google’s Gemini model that recently solved International Math Olympiad problems at a gold‑medal level, according to The Information, which cited people familiar with the matter.
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This wave of hiring comes during a major restructuring of Meta’s AI division. Indeed, the company recently named Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang as Chief AI Officer and committed $14.3 billion to data labeling. It also brought on former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and former Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross, with plans to partially buy out their venture capital fund. Together, Wang and Friedman now manage about 3,400 employees within Meta’s newly formed AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs, which represents one of the largest teams of its kind.
As a result, the battle for top AI talent is heating up across the industry. Microsoft (MSFT), for example, has hired more than 20 former DeepMind employees over the past six months, including a former vice president who worked on the Gemini chatbot. While Meta declined to comment on its latest hires, Google emphasized that it continues to attract top AI researchers, even as competitors step up their own recruiting efforts.
Is Meta a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on META stock based on 41 Buys, four Holds, and zero Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. Furthermore, the average META price target of $759.76 per share implies 7.3% upside potential.
