Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Superintelligence Lab has garnered a lot of attention over the last few months for poaching top AI talent with astronomical salary figures. Zuckerberg, however, isn’t done after making a grand announcement. After collecting all the top talent for its prized AI team, Zuckerberg has now confirmed roping in Shengjia Zhao as the Chief Scientist of his prized Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL). For those missing the reference, Zhao is one of the co-creators of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In a post via Threads, Zuckerberg introduced Zhao’s induction to the elite AI team. “I’m excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. In this role, Shengjia will set the research agenda and scientific direction for our new lab working directly with me and Alex,” he 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.
Zuckerberg also concluded by saying that the goal with the MSL is to build an elite team of top AI talent that pushes the boundaries of AI technology. “The next few years are going to be
very exciting!” writes Zuck in the concluding lines.
While Zhao has been around to build the ultimate AI team, his new role will be instrumental in shaping the research agenda and scientific direction for the Meta Superintelligence Lab. He will work directly with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer, whom Zuckerberg recently brought in from startup Scale AI.
A quick look at Zhao’s achievements
Zhao has an impressive track record in the AI industry, having co-created not only ChatGPT but also GPT-4 and several of OpenAI’s mini models, including GPT-4.1 and GPT-o3. His recruitment is part of a broader trend of researchers transitioning from OpenAI to Meta in recent weeks. Meta is reportedly offering highly astronomical compensation packages and deals to attract top AI researchers. Industry experts say that this strategy is aimed at closing the gap to the leading AI models from rivals like OpenAI and Google. Meta’s Llama 4 model, which was expected to take the battle to OpenAI, has been greeted with underwhelming performance.
Meta Superintelligence Lab:
The Meta Superintelligence Lab was launched by Meta to enhance its efforts not only on the Llama models but also to advance its long-term ambitions in artificial general intelligence (AGI). According to Zuckerberg’s Threads post, Zhao is a co-founder of this new lab while being a part of the FAIR AI research division led by Yann LeCun, the deep learning pioneer. MSL operates independently from FAIR.
