Meta can't keep the Chinese University of Science and Technology hegemony: the big model in Silicon Valley, the Chinese are starting to form their own games
He dropped a $100 million, four-year “contract” in exchange for leaving after 14 months — the talent Zuckerberg had taken from OpenAI and left Meta. In the summer of 2025, Zuckerberg personally knocked out Jiahui Yu (Jiahui Yu), the head of multimodal research, from OpenAI using a salary plan with a total value of up to 100 million US dollars and covering four years. Silicon Valley is on the sidelines, and the industry calls it “stealing people at sky-high prices.” However, just 14 months later — on August 14, 2026, the star researcher, whom Meta had high hopes for, announced his departure and started his own business. A year ago, the blockbuster in the industry ended up being held for a shorter period of time than an NBA season. Just eight days before leaving his job, Muse Spark, the multi-modal model he led, had just been updated to version 1.2. From forming the team to continuously launching the four product lines Muse Spark, Voice Mode, Muse Image, and Muse Video, Yu Jiahui's year at Meta covered almost the entire process of this new team from construction to intensive delivery. Muse Image finished second in the Arena Wensheng Trials Test, beating Google Nano Banana, behind OpenAI GPT Image 2; Muse Video ranked third in the Wensheng video rankings. For Meta, this is certainly an impressive report card. But for Yu Jiahui, this is just an interlude. In his departure statement, he said he was “increasingly drawn to an issue that is critical to the future of humanity but has yet to be fully explored.” Details of the new company have not been disclosed, but he has decided to leave. From the junior class to the history of Yu Jiahui, the top in Silicon Valley, he is at the “top” level for any major AI company. Born in 1995 in Cixi, Zhejiang. In 2012, while still in his sophomore year of high school, he was admitted early to the Junior Class College of the Chinese University of Science and Technology. During his undergraduate studies, he won several contests, including the National Parallel Application Challenge Championship. After graduating in 2016, he went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to study for his PhD in computer vision. This scholar trained many famous figures in the field of AI, such as Zhou Xi, founder of Yuncong Technology, and Han Xu, founder of Wenyuan Zhixing. After graduating from her PhD, Yu Jiahui's career progressed step by step. He has worked as a senior research scientist and manager at Google Brain and Google DeepMind, and has participated in the development of visual modules for the Gemini multi-modal project. Joined OpenAI in October 2023 as the head of the Perception (Perception) team, leading the development of GPT-4O and O-series inference models. In June 2025, Zuckerberg personally stepped down, and Yu Jiahui joined former OpenAI researchers such as Zhao Shengjia, Bi Shuchao, and Ren Hongyu into Meta's newly formed super intelligent team. According to foreign media Wired, Meta's compensation package was as high as $100 million — although Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth later clarified that this was not a one-time signing bonus, but a four-year total compensation plan that included stocks, bonuses, and performance conditions. But even so, this is one of the few sky-high contracts in the AI field. (Photo source: One mu of three-quarters of land) After conversion, even though Yu Jiahui only worked for 14 months, Meta paid an estimated cost of more than 25 million dollars for this short period of cooperation — but the actual cost of sunk was even higher. After all, the investment in team building and project start-up cannot be proportionately calculated. The fanaticism of the capital market is driving Silicon Valley's talent exodus, and Yu Jiahui's departure is by no means an exception. In fact, Silicon Valley in 2026 is experiencing an unprecedented “exodus” of AI talents. According to data from the research platform AlphaXiv, Meta alone has lost more than 200 well-known researchers, and another 929 researchers have “worked at Meta but have left their jobs.” In October of last year, Meta drastically cut more than 600 researchers in the AI business. In June of this year, with Llama 4's poor market performance and the company's implementation of more stringent performance reviews, it is expected that 15% to 20% of employees will be rated as “below expectations”, and many senior researchers have switched to competitors. Tech author Gergely Orosz pointed out that Meta's internal organizational restructuring and efficiency adjustments have caused engineers to feel uneasy, and many senior experts have begun to remain open to external opportunities. Google's situation is no less than happy...
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