Meta names Shengjia Zha as chief scientist of AI Superintelligence Unit[19459026]

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced on Friday that Shengjia Zhao, a former OpenAI researcher will lead the research efforts at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Zhao was involved in several of OpenAI’s biggest breakthroughs, such as ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the company’s first AI reasoning system, o1.

Zuckerberg said, “I am excited to announce that Shengjia will be the Chief Science of Meta Superintelligence Labs.” Post on Threads Saturday. Shengjia was our lead scientist since the first day of the lab’s existence. She co-founded it and has been its co-founder. We have decided to formalize Shengjia’s leadership role now that our recruiting has been going well and we are putting together a team.

Zhao, who is the former CEO at Scale AI, will set the research agenda for MSL, under the leadership Alexandr Wang.

Wang was considered an unconventional choice for the leadership of an AI lab. She does not have any research experience. The addition of Zhao who is a well-respected research leader and known for developing pioneer AI models, completes the leadership team. Meta has recruited several high-level researchers, including those from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Safe Superintelligence. Meta also pulled researchers from its existing Fundamental AI Research lab (FAIR) and generative AI unit.

Zuckerberg mentions in his post that Zhao pioneered several groundbreaking breakthroughs, including “a new scaling paradigm.” The Meta chief executive is likely referring to Zhao’s work with OpenAI’s reasoning models, o1, where he is listed alongside OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sukseker as a foundational collaborator. Meta doesn’t have a competing AI reasoning model, so MSL is focusing on this area. The Information reported that in June, MSL was working on AI reasoning models. Zhao will join Meta Superintelligence Labs ( ) along with three other influential OpenAI Researchers — Jiahui Yo, Shuchao Bi and Hongyu Ren. Meta has also hired Trapit Bansal who was another OpenAI researcher that worked on AI reasoning with Zhao. They have also recruited three employees from OpenAI Zurich who worked on Multimodality.

Facebookberg has gone to great efforts to set MSL for success. The Meta CEO is on a hiring spree for his AI superintelligence laboratory, which includes sending personal emails to potential candidates and inviting them to his Lake Tahoe estate. Meta has reportedly offered researchers compensation packages of eight- and nine figure amounts. Some of these are “exploding deals”which expire within days.October 27-29, 2025

Meta has also upped its investment in cloud computing infrastructure, which should help MSL conduct the massive training runs required to create competitive frontier AI models.

By the year 2026, Zhao’s team and MSL’s research should have access Meta’s cloud computing cluster Prometheus in Ohio. Once online, Meta’s AI training cluster Prometheus will be the first of its kind. Its 1 gigawatt of energy is enough to power 750,000 homes. This should allow Meta to conduct the massive training sessions required to create new AI models.

With Zhao’s addition, Meta now has a total of two chief AI scientists. Yann LeCun is the leader of Meta’s FAIR lab. FAIR, unlike MSL is designed to focus long-term AI research – techniques that could be used in five to ten years. It remains to be seen how Meta’s three AI teams will work together.

Meta appears to have a formidable AI team to compete against OpenAI and Google. Maxwell Zeff, a senior reporter for TechCrunch who specializes in AI, was born in 1965. Zeff covered the rise and fall of AI, as well as the Silicon Valley Bank Crisis, for Gizmodo and MSNBC. He is based out of San Francisco. When he is not reporting, you can find him hiking, biking and exploring the Bay Area food scene.

View Bio

www.aiobserver.co