Meta director Chaya Nayak joins OpenAI; says in a long note on LinkedIn: What I didn’t know in my first few weeks at Facebook was that …
Meta Superintelligence Labs, the ambitious AI project of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has faced another setback. Recently, an AI scientist Rishabh Agarwal announced his exit from the company. Now, another Indian-origin AI researcher has resigned from the company. Chaya Nayak one the key AI researchers at Mea has announced her departure from the company to join rival OpenAI. Nayak announced her decision in a LinkedIn post. In the post shared on LinkedIn, Nayak has talked about her nearly decade-long journey at Meta, beginning with the Data for Good initiative and culminating in her work on generative AI, including Meta’s Llama models.“What I didn’t know then was that those first weeks would turn into nearly a decade of the most pivotal experiences of my life,” Nayak wrote, recalling her early days at Facebook.Nayak’s career at Meta included multiple projects. She helped build Disaster Maps to support communities in crisis and also led Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) team. Recently, Nayak played an important role in developing Meta’s Llama models.
Read Chaya Nayak’s complete LinkedIn post here
I remember my first weeks at Facebook like they were yesterday. I joined to help jumpstart Data for Good, an effort to show how data and AI/ML could benefit the world. What started as a bold experiment grew into the foundation of my career.What I didn’t know then was that those first weeks would turn into nearly a decade of the most pivotal experiences of my life. Over the years, Meta gave me the chance to:– Build products that supported communities in crisis with Disaster Maps.– Stand up the Facebook Open Research and Transparency Team (aka FORT) and navigate the messy but essential worlds of data cleaning, differential privacy, and data clean rooms and help the company build the tools to share data with the world to study our platform.– Help the company and the world through historic moments like the U.S. 2020 elections and publish several papers with top researchers in journals like Science on Meta’s impact on elections and democracy.– And, in the last 2.5 years, work on GenAI – building three generations of Llama and Meta AI, solving hard problems at incredible speed, and imagining what the next wave of AI could mean for society.Along the way, I grew as a leader. I learned confidence, boldness to chase audacious ideas, and resilience when things didn’t go as planned. Most importantly, I built a network of colleagues and friends who shaped me and inspired me every step of the way.At the same time, I couldn’t be more excited for what’s ahead. Today, I’m joining OpenAI to work with Irina Kofman on Special Initiatives – exploring new opportunities at the frontier of AI. It feels like the perfect next chapter: to take everything I’ve learned, and pour it into work that will help define what comes next for technology and society.
Joining OpenAI’s special initiatives team
Nayak has confirmed that she will be joining OpenAI’s Special Initiatives team. She described the move as a natural evolution of her career, saying, “It feels like the perfect next chapter: to take everything I’ve learned, and pour it into work that will help define what comes next for technology and society”.
