Meta has appointed former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist of its newly launched Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), signaling an aggressive push into cutting-edge AI development. Zhao, a co-founder of the lab, previously contributed to breakthrough systems including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1.
Zhao will oversee MSL’s research agenda under Alexandr Wang, former Scale AI CEO, who was recently tapped to lead the unit. While Wang’s appointment was seen as unconventional given his non-research background, Zhao’s leadership brings deep technical credibility to Meta’s latest AI initiative.
Meta has been aggressively recruiting top researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and Apple, while pulling talent from its own FAIR and generative AI teams. MSL’s mission centers on developing frontier models, with AI reasoning seen as a strategic priority. Meta has backed this effort with unprecedented infrastructure investment, including its upcoming 1-gigawatt Prometheus training cluster in Ohio, set to go live by 2026.
With Zhao joining Yann LeCun, who continues to lead Meta’s long-term FAIR lab, the company now fields two of the most influential AI scientists in the world — positioning it to compete directly with OpenAI and Google in the race for superintelligence.
Featured image: Credit: Alexandr Wang, X
