Meta appoints ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist of superintelligence lab
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Meta has named Shengjia Zhao, one of the co-creators behind ChatGPT, as the Chief Scientist of its newly formed Superintelligence Lab.
The announcement was made by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Threads post on Friday, signaling the company’s intensified focus on cutting-edge artificial intelligence.
"In this role, Shengjia will set the research agenda and scientific direction for our new lab, working directly with me and Alex," Zuckerberg wrote, referring to Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer.
Wang was brought on board from startup Scale AI, in which Meta holds a major stake.
Zhao previously worked as a research scientist at OpenAI, where he helped develop ChatGPT, GPT-4, and several of OpenAI’s compact models like GPT-4.1 and o3.
He now joins a growing number of high-profile researchers moving from OpenAI to Meta, as the tech giant attempts to bolster its talent pool and compete more aggressively in the AI space. This hiring spree follows tepid reviews of Meta’s Llama 4 model, prompting the company to double down on recruiting top-tier talent with attractive compensation and strategic partnerships.
The Superintelligence Lab, which Zhao co-founded, was established to unify Meta’s efforts on its Llama models and to drive progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Unlike FAIR, Meta’s long-standing AI research arm headed by deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun, the new lab functions independently with a specific mandate for long-term AGI innovation.
Zuckerberg has reiterated Meta’s ambition to build “full general intelligence” and to make its advancements available as open source — a move that has sparked both optimism and concern within the broader AI community.