A $100 million salary couldn't keep him: Yu Jiahui leaves Meta to start a new venture

Yu Jiahui, a renowned AI researcher, has announced his departure from Meta after just over a year. He joined Meta in late June 2025 as a founding member of TBD Lab, part of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), where he led multimodal research. Reports suggested Meta offered him a $100 million annual salary, the highest in AI talent market history, although Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth later clarified that such figures were not uniform or guaranteed. Under his leadership, his team released Muse Spark, the first foundation model from MSL, marking Meta's shift from Llama to the Muse series, followed by Voice Mode, Muse Image, and Muse Video, with the latest Muse Spark 1.2 emphasizing coding and long-horizon agent tasks. Yu also recruited researchers like Zhiqing Sun, who eventually contributed to his departure. Prior to Meta, Yu worked at Google Brain on Gemini's multimodal direction and at OpenAI on Perception, contributing to GPT-4o and GPT-4.1. His departure follows a wave of over 200 notable researchers leaving Meta, with an alphaXiv list showing 929 former Meta researchers, leading to speculation about Meta's talent retention strategy and the future of its AI research, which remains To Be Determined.