Meta appoints former OpenAI employee Shenjia Zhao as chief scientist for its new AI research division, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)



There is

a fierce competition to poach talented people in the AI industry, and Meta, under the leadership of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is working hard to secure engineers and researchers based on The List . Meta is gathering the talented people it has poached into a new AI research division called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) , which is working on developing 'superintelligence' that can perform tasks equal to or better than humans. It has been revealed that former OpenAI employee Shenjia Zhao has been appointed as the chief scientist for MSL.

Meta names Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist of AI superintelligence unit | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/25/meta-names-shengjia-zhao-as-chief-scientist-of-ai-superintelligence-unit/



Meta established MSL in July 2025 to develop AI that surpasses humans. Meta's AI development will be carried out at MSL, and Alexander Wang, CEO of Scale AI, an investment by Meta, has been appointed as the institute's Chief AI Officer.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces the establishment of 'Meta Superintelligence Labs' to develop AI that surpasses human knowledge - GIGAZINE


By Cory Doctorow

On July 26, 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he had appointed Shenjia Zhao as MLS's chief scientist. According to CEO Zuckerberg, Zhao is a co-founder of MLS and has been active as its lead scientist, and explains that 'he will continue to work with the team to pioneer the forefront of superintelligence research.'

Zhao is a former OpenAI researcher who has been involved in the development of a number of groundbreaking products, including ChatGPT, the chat AI synonymous with ChatGPT, the large-scale language model (LLM) GPT-4, and OpenAI's first AI inference model, o1.

The image below shows CEO Zuckerberg, Wang, and Zhao from left to right.



Wang, MSL's Chief AI Officer, also congratulated Zhao on his appointment as chief scientist on his X account, writing, 'We are pleased to announce that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist at MSL! Shengjia is an outstanding scientist who has recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research. He will lead the scientific direction of our team.'




'Wang, who has no research experience, was seen as a bit of an unconventional person to lead the AI lab. Having Zhao, a renowned researcher known for developing cutting-edge AI models, as chief scientist will strengthen the leadership,' TechCrunch said.

Meta has previously recruited talent from competitors such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Safe Superintelligence, Apple, and Anthropic, as well as from Meta's existing fundamental AI research team (Meta FAIR) and generative AI unit.

Meta poached key OpenAI researchers to accelerate the development of its own inference models - GIGAZINE



Meta successfully poached Apple's head of AI models, Mark Zuckerberg continues to steal talent from competitors - GIGAZINE



TechCrunch points out that Wang's statement that 'his research has recently pioneered new scaling paradigms' is likely a reference to Zhao's work on OpenAI's inference model, o1, for which Zhao is listed as a foundational contributor along with OpenAI co-founder Ilya Satkiv. Meta does not offer an inference AI comparable to o1, so developing inference models is an area of current focus for MSL.

The Information first reported that Zhao had been recruited by Meta, along with Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren, three of OpenAI's leading AI researchers. TechCrunch later reported that Trapit Bansal, another researcher who worked with Zhao on developing inference models, and three researchers working on multimodality research had also been recruited by Meta.

With Zhao as chief scientist, Meta now has two chief scientists. The other is Yann LeCun, leader of Meta FAIR. Meta FAIR focuses on long-term AI research, that is, technologies that may be used in the next 5 to 10 years. It is unclear how Meta's AI research institutes will work together in the future.

Related Posts:

in AI,   Note, Posted by logu_ii