Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will lead research efforts at the company\u2019s new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao contributed to several of OpenAI\u2019s largest breakthroughs, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the company\u2019s first AI reasoning model, o1.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs,\u201d Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads<\/a> Friday. \u201cShengjia 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n We are excited to announce that @shengjia_zhao<\/a> will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs!<\/p>\n Shengjia is a brilliant scientist who most recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research. He will lead our scientific direction for our team.<\/p>\n Let’s go \ud83d\ude80 pic.twitter.com\/D93KQWIvFl<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) July 25, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n Wang, who does not have a research background, was viewed as a somewhat unconventional choice<\/a> 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\u2019s existing Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab and generative AI unit.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg notes in his post that Zhao has pioneered several breakthroughs, including a \u201cnew scaling paradigm.\u201d The Meta CEO is likely referencing Zhao\u2019s work on OpenAI\u2019s reasoning model, o1, in which he is listed as a foundational contributor alongside OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Meta currently doesn\u2019t offer a competitor to o1, so AI reasoning models are a key area of focus for MSL.<\/p>\n The Information reported in June that Zhao would be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs<\/a>, alongside three other influential OpenAI researchers \u2014 Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. Meta has also recruited\u00a0Trapit Bansal<\/a>, another OpenAI researcher who worked on AI reasoning models with Zhao, as well as three employees from OpenAI\u2019s Zurich office who worked on multimodality.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cexploding offers\u201d<\/a> that expire in a matter of days.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco 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.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n