And now, it appears that Meta has made the appointment official by naming Shengjia Zhao as the Chief Scientist of its newly established Superintelligence Labs. Zhao co-founded the lab and has been its long-time lead scientific innovator since its inception. Under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, the lab’s visionary director, Zhao will help set a course to unify and enrich the lab’s novel research agenda. This important appointment is part of Meta’s larger efforts to lead the way in artificial intelligence research and innovation.
Shengjia Zhao, formerly at Meta. He’s coming off a stellar career at OpenAI, where he was instrumental in launching innovative projects such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. His influence doesn’t stop at these famous models. He had a critical part in the founding team for building OpenAI’s first AI reasoning model, o1. Zhao has made quite a name for himself by upending all conventional thinking on AI. This new scaling paradigm has vastly improved the capabilities of AI systems, which were previously very limited.
The creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs has lured a deep bench of the most powerful talent away from OpenAI. Along with Zhao, three other prominent former or current scientists—Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren—will come to the lab. This collaboration is no small feat for Meta. This unlocks the company’s potential to draw from the expertise of these leaders and continue pushing the boundaries of what AI technology can do.
To help the lab achieve its ambitious goals, Meta has invested significantly in cloud computing infrastructure. Come 2026, Zhao and his team will have the enormous resource of Meta’s still under construction one gigawatt cloud computing cluster. This amazing resource, called Prometheus, is based in Ohio. This facility will be the backdrop for some very long training runs. Researchers will deploy it to test their AI models and calibrate them.
Mark Zuckerberg is ecstatic about Zhao’s appointment. He proclaimed, To this end, I’m thrilled to announce that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. He emphasized Zhao’s significance within the organization, noting that “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.”
Alexandr Wang underscored Zhao’s exceptional qualifications. “We are excited to announce that @shengjia_zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs!” he stated. First off, Shengjia is an incredibly talented scientist who, in his most recent work, was leading the way on a new scaling paradigm. As Chief Scientist, he will guide our scientific strategy for our all-star team.
Based in San Francisco, Zhao’s leadership is expected to enhance Meta’s position in the competitive field of artificial intelligence research. As the lab continues to grow its dynamic team and deliver cutting-edge projects, its mission is to develop breakthrough technologies that have the potential to transform national transportation and energy infrastructure and industrial competitiveness.