Meta names Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist of AI superintelligence unit | TechCrunch
So Zuck just made a pretty big move in the AI talent wars. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will lead research efforts at the company's new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao's got some serious cred - he contributed to several of OpenAI's biggest breakthroughs, including ChatGPT , GPT-4 , and their first AI reasoning model, o1.
"I'm excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs," Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads Friday. "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."
Zhao will set a research agenda for MSL under Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who was recently hired to lead the unit. Wang doesn't actually have a research background, which seemed kinda weird to me at first for an AI lab leader. But the addition of Zhao, who's known for developing frontier AI models, really rounds out the leadership team.
Meta's been on a hiring spree, pulling in researchers from everywhere - OpenAI, Google DeepMind , Safe Superintelligence, Apple, and Anthropic. They've also grabbed folks from their own FAIR lab and generative AI unit. I've noticed Meta's AI leadership team in 2025 is looking pretty stacked.
Zuckerberg mentioned that Zhao pioneered several breakthroughs, including a "new scaling paradigm." He's probably talking about Zhao's work on OpenAI's reasoning model, o1. Meta doesn't have anything like o1 yet, so AI reasoning models are gonna be a key focus for MSL.
The Information reported back in June that Zhao would be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs with three other OpenAI researchers — Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. Meta also nabbed Trapit Bansal, who worked with Zhao on AI reasoning models, plus three employees from OpenAI's Zurich office who specialized in multimodality.
Zuck's really going all out for this. He's been personally emailing researchers and even inviting prospects to his Lake Tahoe estate! And the compensation packages? Insane. I've heard Meta has offered some researchers eight and nine-figure deals, some with "exploding offers" that expire in days. Talk about pressure!
Meta's also pumping money into cloud computing infrastructure. By 2026, Zhao and his team should have access to Meta's 1 gigawatt cloud computing cluster, Prometheus, in Ohio. That's enough power for 750,000 homes! This'll help them run the massive training needed for competitive frontier AI models.
With Zhao on board, Meta now has two chief AI scientists - him and Yann LeCun, who leads Meta's FAIR lab. FAIR focuses on long-term research, stuff that might be used 5-10 years from now. How will Meta's three AI units work together? That's still up in the air. But one thing's clear - Meta's now got a serious AI research agenda to take on OpenAI and Google.
