Meta Multimodal AI Lead Jiahui Yu Leaves to Launch Startup

Jiahui Yu is a prominent multimodal AI researcher who previously co-led Gemini multimodal work at Google DeepMind and headed OpenAI’s perception team, contributing to models including GPT-4o. Meta recruited him in 2025 as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s push to strengthen its superintelligence effort. His compensation was reported at about $100 million, though the terms were not publicly confirmed, making the hire a symbol of Silicon Valley’s escalating contest for elite AI talent.

Yu said in August 2026 that he was leaving Meta after roughly a year to start a company focused on a new, undisclosed problem he described as important to humanity’s future. At Meta, he led multimodal development across the Muse model family, including Muse Spark, released in April, and Muse Image and Muse Video, unveiled in July. As of Aug. 14, Yu had not disclosed the startup’s name, funding, team or detailed research agenda.