Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Shengjia Zhao, a well-known AI researcher and one of the co-creators of ChatGPT and GPT-4, has joined Meta as the Chief Scientist of its new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).
Zhao, who was a former lead scientist at OpenAI, helped build ChatGPT, GPT-4, and several other models, including GPT-4.1 and o3. He also worked on synthetic data research at OpenAI, which helps train AI models better.
Now, at Meta, he will work closely with Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, Meta’s newly appointed Chief AI Officer. Alexandr Wang is also the founder of Scale AI, the startup where Meta recently invested over $14 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg shared the news in a Threads post, saying, “In this role, Shengjia will set the research agenda and scientific direction for our new lab, working directly with me and Alex.” He also called Zhao a “pioneer” in the AI field who has led several major AI breakthroughs.
Zhao’s appointment is part of Meta’s larger plan to develop Artificial Superintelligence, often called ASI. Meta recently launched the Superintelligence Labs to focus on this goal. The lab will build powerful AI systems that are safe and helpful for humans.
It will also work on improving Meta’s Llama models, which have not yet performed as expected. Zhao is now a co-founder of the Superintelligence Labs, which will operate separately from FAIR, Meta’s original AI research team led by deep learning expert Yann LeCun.
Meta has been working hard to build up its AI team. The company has recently hired many researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Among them are the three researchers who started OpenAI’s Zurich office — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai.
These researchers also previously worked at Google DeepMind. With these new hires, Meta is building a strong team to support its big plans in AI.
Meta is spending huge amounts of money to lead in AI. It has invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and is offering high salaries and strong benefits to attract top AI talent. Some reports even say that Mark Zuckerberg has personally emailed AI researchers and invited them to his home to convince them to join Meta.
However, not everyone agrees with Meta’s hiring strategy. In a recent podcast, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said, “The degree to which they’re focusing on money and not the work and not the mission—I don’t think that’s going to set up a great culture.” He said Meta’s large salary offers to his employees are “crazy.”
Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, also shared his thoughts on the same topic in a podcast with Lex Fridman. He said, “Meta right now is not at the frontier, maybe they’ll manage to get back on there. It’s probably rational what they’re doing from their perspective because they’re behind and they need to do something.”
There is also a shortage of highly skilled AI researchers in the world. Naveen Rao, VP at Databricks, compared the situation to finding a top basketball player. “It’s like looking for LeBron James,” he said, estimating that fewer than 1,000 people worldwide can build the kind of advanced AI models companies are now developing.
Other companies are trying to find different ways to attract AI talent, such as offering better computing power or hosting AI hackathons. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, said he tried to recruit a Meta researcher, but the researcher told him to come back when his company had “10,000 H100s,” referring to the powerful GPUs used in AI training.
The AI talent war is clearly heating up, and Meta is doing everything it can to come out on top. Its Superintelligence Labs is different from its earlier AI division, FAIR. While FAIR continues its work on research and development, MSL will focus on building large-scale, future-ready AI models that could one day match or even surpass human intelligence.
