Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday announced that his company’s new Superintelligence Labs has appointed ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao as the chief scientist. In the new role, Zhao will set the research agenda at the newly set up AI lab, define its scientific direction, and report directly to Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.
Announcing the appointment in a post on Threads, Zuckerberg wrote, “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.”
“Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs, including a new scaling paradigm, and distinguished himself as a leader in the field. I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision,” he added.
Ever since the dull reception of Meta’s latest Llama model releases in April, Mark Zuckerberg has been working to get the company back to the frontline of the highly contested AI race—first with the $14 billion acquisition of Scale AI and later with the launch of a new organisation called Meta Superintelligence Labs, which has been actively wooing talent away from top AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and even Apple.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg also confirmed in the same post that Yann LeCun—the AI researcher who has worked at the company for over a decade and holds the title of Chief Scientist—is staying at Meta. He will continue as the chief scientist at an internal AI research group called FAIR.
LeCun also issued a clarification on his position at Meta in a post on LinkedIn, writing, “My role as Chief Scientist for FAIR has always been focused on long-term AI research and building next AI paradigms. My role and FAIR’s mission remain unchanged.”
Who is Shengjia Zhao?
Zhao was among a dozen or so employees who left OpenAI for Meta in recent months. He is also the co-author of the original ChatGPT research paper and was a key researcher on the first OpenAI reasoning model, o1, according to a Bloomberg report.
OpenAI’s o1 model popularised the category of reasoning models and inspired a wave of similar “chain-of-thought” models from Google, DeepSeek, xAI, and others.
According to a previous memo from Zuckerberg, Zhao handled synthetic data at OpenAI before moving to Meta. He also holds a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.
