Meta's reported Rs 800 crore offer highlights AI researcher Trapit Bansal's career path

Meta is reported to have extended a remuneration package approaching Rs 800 crore to lure Trapit Bansal, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, into its newly formed AI division. Bansal's academic foundation includes an integrated M.Sc. in Mathematics and Statistics from IIT Kanpur (2007-2012) and a research stint at the Indian Institute of Science focusing on Bayesian methods. He later pursued both a master's degree and a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, concentrating on natural-language processing, deep learning and meta-learning.

His professional résumé features research internships at major tech firms—Facebook, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI—followed by a technical staff role at OpenAI where he contributed to reinforcement-learning and reasoning models such as the o1 family. In 2025 he moved to Meta as a founding researcher for its AI research division. The narrative illustrates that the eye-catching salary figure rests on a decade-plus of rigorous education, research experience and contributions to cutting-edge AI systems.