Former Meta AI head Jiahui Yu quits to launch secret startup after $100M payday

Jiahui Yu, the former head of Meta's multimodal AI research, has officially resigned after just over a year at the company to launch an undisclosed startup. Yu joined Meta in June 2025 as a founding member of TBD Lab within Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), personally poached by Mark Zuckerberg. Reports at the time suggested his compensation package could reach $100 million in the first year. During his tenure, he built the multimodal team from scratch, re-architected the technical stack, and delivered a string of flagship models: Muse Spark, Voice Mode, Muse Image, and Muse Video. The recently released Muse Spark 1.2 further advanced coding, long-horizon agent tasks, and multimodal capabilities.

In his departure announcement, Yu said the experience of building TBD Lab with Zuckerberg and Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang was "very inspiring and fulfilling," but he has become increasingly attracted to a problem that is "extremely important to the future of humanity but has not been fully explored yet." He has not revealed the company's name, research focus, or partners, only promising more information as work takes shape. His exit follows a broader talent exodus pattern at top AI labs, where even nine-figure compensation packages cannot always retain elite researchers chasing moonshot problems. Industry observers are already speculating whether this signals a shift toward AI safety, human-level intelligence, or an entirely new frontier.