Meta’s AI Push: Zuckerberg Announces Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist of Superintelligence Lab

Meta Platforms has appointed Shengjia Zhao, a former OpenAI research scientist and one of the architects of ChatGPT and GPT‑4, as Chief Scientist of its newly launched Superintelligence Lab (MSL), CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday on Threads.

Zhao will “set the research agenda and scientific direction” for MSL alongside Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, marking a critical step in Meta’s bid to catch up with rivals in advanced AI development.

Meta’s Frontier AI Push

Zhao, credited with co‑creating OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GPT‑4, and mini‑models such as GPT‑4.1 and o3, joins poached pool of talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Apple that Zuckerberg has courted with industry‑leading compensation packages.

“I’m excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs,” wrote Zuckerberg. “Shengjia co‑founded the lab and has been our lead scientist from day one. Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.”

Launched to consolidate work on Meta’s Llama series and long‑term artificial general‑intelligence (AGI) ambitions, MSL operates separately from the company’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division, led by deep‑learning pioneer Yann LeCun. Unlike FAIR, which focuses on exploratory techniques with impact five to ten years out, MSL is charged with delivering near‑term breakthroughs in reasoning models and scaling paradigms.

Zhao’s prior work on OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, developed with Ilya Sutskever, signals MSL’s intent to field competitive AI reasoning systems.

Wang, Meta’s former Scale AI CEO, will oversee operations, while Zhao drives the lab’s scientific vision. Recent hires include multiple OpenAI researchers, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Hongyu Ren, and collaborators like Trapit Bansal, reflecting Meta’s aggressive talent‑acquisition strategy. Zuckerberg has personally courted prospects, inviting them to his Lake Tahoe estate and deploying “exploding offers” that expire within days.

To support this cadre, Meta is amping up its computing infrastructure. By 2026, MSL researchers will gain access to Prometheus, a 1 gigawatt AI training cluster in Ohio, enough energy capacity to power over 750,000 homes. This investment follows Meta’s recent “Supercomputing as a Service” expansion and will enable the massive training runs required for next‑generation language and multimodal models.

With Zhao’s appointment, Meta now fields two chief AI scientists, Yann LeCun at FAIR and Shengjia Zhao at MSL, alongside Wang’s operational leadership. As Meta accelerates its open‑source AGI strategy, the newly fortified Superintelligence Lab aims to close the gap on OpenAI and Google, positioning the social‑media titan for a more competitive future in the race for frontier AI.