Meta appoints Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist at Meta AI unit

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will lead research at the company’s new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), as the Chief Scientist. Zhao has contributed to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the company’s 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. “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 formalise his leadership role.”

Zhao is expected to 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. Zuckerberg has also clarified that Yann LeCun will continue to be Chief Scientist for Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR).

To further fill out the unit, the tech company has hired several researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Safe Superintelligence, Apple, and Anthropic, as well as researchers from Meta’s existing Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab and generative AI unit.

According to media reports, Zhao would be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, alongside three other 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.

The company has also reportedly increased 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 reportedly should have access to Meta’s 1 gigawatt cloud computing cluster, Prometheus, located in Ohio once online.