The journey of Trapit Bansal, the IITian behind Meta’s big AI offer

Trapit Bansal’s reported move to Meta for a compensation package nearing Rs 800 crore has drawn attention to the IIT Kanpur alumnus’s remarkable AI career. His journey includes advanced studies at IISc and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, research internships at Facebook, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, and work on reinforcement learning and reasoning models at OpenAI. Now a founding researcher at Meta’s AI division, Bansal’s story highlights how years of specialised education and research can build extraordinary expertise.