Meta has hired former OpenAI researcher Yang Song as the research principal for its Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Mark Zuckerberg recruited Song, who started at the company earlier this month, according to multiple sources.
Song previously led the strategic explorations team at OpenAI. In his new position at Meta, he reports directly to Shengjia Zhao. Zhao, another OpenAI alum, has overseen the MSL initiative since July.
Who is Yang Song?
A highly influential figure in the field of artificial intelligence, Dr. Yang Song is a research scientist recognized for his pivotal contributions to the development of diffusion models, a class of generative models that have significantly advanced the capabilities of AI in creating realistic images, text, and other data.
Dr. Song recently made headlines in September 2025 for moving from OpenAI, where he led the strategic explorations team, to Meta’s Superintelligence Labs as a research principal. His research has been instrumental in the development of powerful AI systems, and his work at Stanford University, where he earned his Ph.D., laid some of the foundational techniques for OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image generation model. He is also slated to become an Assistant Professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computing + Mathematical Sciences.
His work focuses on building powerful AI models capable of understanding, generating, and reasoning with complex, high-dimensional data across various modalities.
