Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that Shengjia Zhao, a former researcher at OpenAI, will serve as Chief Scientist of the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao previously played a key role in developing OpenAI’s major AI systems, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and its reasoning model o1.
Zuckerberg shared the news via Threads, stating that Zhao co-founded MSL and has led its scientific efforts from the beginning. “Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role,” he wrote.
Zhao will oversee the lab’s research agenda under the broader direction of Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, who now heads MSL.
Zhao is recognized for advancing a “new scaling paradigm,” likely referring to his contributions to the o1 reasoning model alongside OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever. Reasoning models are expected to be a major focus for MSL, as Meta currently lacks a direct competitor to o1.
Zhao is joining MSL along with several former OpenAI colleagues, including Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Hongyu Ren, Trapit Bansal, and a group of multimodal AI experts from OpenAI’s Zurich office.
By 2026, MSL researchers will have access to Prometheus, Meta’s 1-gigawatt AI training cluster located in Ohio. The facility is expected to provide the computing capacity needed to train advanced AI systems at scale.
With Zhao on board, Meta now has two chief AI scientists: Zhao and Yann LeCun, who continues to lead Meta’s FAIR lab focused on long-term research. How FAIR, MSL, and Meta’s core AI teams will coordinate remains an open question.
