Meta names Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist of AI superintelligence unit

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will lead research efforts at the company’s new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao contributed to several of OpenAI’s largest breakthroughs, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the company’s first AI reasoning model, o1.

“I’m excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads Friday. “Shengjia co-founded the new 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.”

Zhao will set a research agenda for MSL under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who was recently hired to lead the new unit.

Wang, who does not have a research background, was viewed as a somewhat unconventional choice to lead an AI lab. The addition of Zhao, who is a reputable research leader known for developing frontier AI models, rounds out the leadership team. To further fill out the unit, Meta has hired several high-level researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Safe Superintelligence, Apple, and Anthropic, as well as pulling researchers from Meta’s existing Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab and generative AI unit.

Zuckerberg notes in his post that Zhao has pioneered several breakthroughs, including a “new scaling paradigm.” The Meta CEO is likely referencing Zhao’s work on OpenAI’s reasoning model, o1, in which he is listed as a foundational contributor alongside OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Meta currently doesn’t offer a competitor to o1, so AI reasoning models are a key area of focus for MSL.

The Information reported in June that Zhao would be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, alongside three other influential OpenAI researchers — Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. Meta has also recruited Trapit Bansal, another OpenAI researcher who worked on AI reasoning models with Zhao, as well as three employees from OpenAI’s Zurich office who worked on multimodality.

Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to set MSL up for success. The Meta CEO has been on a recruiting spree to staff up his AI superintelligence lab, which has entailed sending personal emails to researchers and inviting prospects to his Lake Tahoe estate. Meta has reportedly offered some researchers eight- and nine-figure compensation packages, some of which are “exploding offers” that expire in a matter of days.

Meta has also upped its investment in cloud computing infrastructure, which should help MSL conduct the massive training runs required to create competitive frontier AI models.

By 2026, Zhao and MSL’s researchers should have access to Meta’s 1 gigawatt cloud computing cluster, Prometheus, located in Ohio. Once online, Meta will be one of the first technology companies with an AI training cluster of Prometheus’ size — 1 gigawatt is enough energy to power more than 750,000 homes. That should help Meta conduct the massive training runs required to create frontier AI models.

With the addition of Zhao, Meta now has two chief AI scientists, including Yann LeCun, the leader of Meta’s FAIR lab. Unlike MSL, FAIR is designed to focus on long-term AI research — techniques that may be used five to 10 years from now. How exactly Meta’s three AI units will work together remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, Meta now seems to have a formidable AI leadership team to compete with OpenAI and Google.