Meta appoints ChatGPT co-creator as AI lab’s chief scientist

Meta has officially named former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao as the chief scientist of its newly formed artificial intelligence (AI) team, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the appointment, confirming Zhao’s leadership in a post on Threads. 

Zhao, who co-founded the lab and has been leading research since its inception, will now take on a formal leadership role as the team expands.

“I’m excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs,” Zuckerberg stated.

For those unversed, Zhao is a well-regarded AI expert known for contributing to some of OpenAI’s most significant advancements, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the AI reasoning model o1.

With Meta aiming to compete in frontier AI development, Zhao's expertise will be instrumental in guiding MSL's research direction.

The lab itself is led by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, who was recently brought in to oversee MSL.

While Wang doesn’t have a traditional research background, Zhao's appointment adds critical scientific credibility to the leadership team.

It is worth noting that Meta has recruited top talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Apple, Anthropic, and its own FAIR and generative AI teams.

Notable new hires include Trapit Bansal and three researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich office who previously worked on multimodal systems.

In his post, Zuckerberg also highlighted Zhao’s contributions to “a new scaling paradigm,” likely referencing his work on o1.