Meta names Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist of AI superintelligence unit

Meta has officially named former OpenAI scientist Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist of its new AI initiative, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao, who played a leading role in the development of GPT-4 and the o1 model, had been leading the lab informally since its founding, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In a Threads post Friday, Zuckerberg said Zhao would now formally take on the leadership role as MSL’s research head. Zhao will report to Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO now directing Meta’s advanced AI division.

Zhao joins several former OpenAI researchers at MSL and will focus on advancing reasoning models, a field where Meta is playing catch-up. The lab is expected to begin using Meta’s 1-gigawatt Prometheus compute cluster in 2026.