On Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will lead research efforts at the company’s newly formed AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao, who co-founded MSL, played a key role in several of OpenAI’s major achievements, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the pioneering AI reasoning model known as o1.

 

“I’m excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs,” Zuckerberg posted 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 formalize his leadership role.”

 

Zhao will set MSL’s research agenda under Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO recently brought on to lead the new division. While Wang’s non-research background raised eyebrows, Zhao’s deep expertise in frontier AI models adds technical leadership to the team. Meta has also attracted top talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Safe Superintelligence, Apple, Anthropic, and its own FAIR lab and generative AI teams.

 

Zuckerberg highlighted Zhao’s contributions, including a “new scaling paradigm,” likely referencing his work on OpenAI’s reasoning model o1. Meta currently lacks a direct competitor to o1, making AI reasoning a key focus for MSL.

 

Reports earlier this year noted Zhao would join Meta alongside OpenAI researchers Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. Additional recruits include Trapit Bansal — another researcher focused on AI reasoning — and several OpenAI staff from Zurich specializing in multimodal AI.

 

To build a world-class AI team, Zuckerberg has reportedly made direct recruiting pitches, even hosting candidates at his Lake Tahoe estate. Meta is said to have offered some candidates compensation packages in the eight- and nine-figure range, including offers that expire within days.

 

Alongside talent, Meta is scaling its infrastructure. By 2026, Zhao and his team will gain access to Prometheus, Meta’s planned 1 gigawatt AI cloud computing cluster in Ohio — enough to power over 750,000 homes — enabling the large-scale training required for cutting-edge AI models.

 

With Zhao’s appointment, Meta now has two prominent AI research leaders: Zhao at MSL and Yann LeCun at FAIR, which focuses on longer-term AI breakthroughs. How MSL, FAIR, and Meta’s generative AI team will coordinate remains to be seen, but the company now fields a leadership team positioned to rival OpenAI and Google in the race for AI innovation.