Zuckerberg’s Superintelligence Labs gets chief scientist from OpenAI

Mark Zuckerberg, in his quest to establish Meta as an AI powerhouse, is bulking up on industry’s cream. In a fresh development, Zuckerberg announced that he has appointed Shengjia Zhao as the chief scientist of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs unit. Prior to his association with Meta, Zhao is renowned for playing a key role in developing OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Zuckerberg highlights Zhao’s role

Zhao is actually among the co-founders of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, Zuckerberg disclosed over the weekend via a post on Threads. As his role at Meta’s AI-focused unit’s chief scientist, Zhao will map out the AI research agenda and scientific direction for Meta.

“Shengjia has been our lead scientist from day one,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision. Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field.”

Meta’s Superintelligence Labs unit was announced on July 1 with the intention of creating AI models that can complete dedicated tasks as good as humans or better.

Since announcing the new unit, Meta has repeatedly made it to the headlines for poaching AI experts from rival Big Tech firms including Apple and Microsoft among others.

Announcing Zhao’s role at the Superintelligence Labs, the Meta chief said, “now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.”

Zhao has expressed excitement around his entry into Meta.

“I am very excited to take up the role as chief scientist of Meta superintelligence labs. Looking forward to building artificial superintelligence (ASI) and aligning it to empower people with the amazing team here. Let’s build,” he posted as his first and only post so far on Threads.

Zuckerberg’s plans with Superintelligence Labs

Earlier this month, Zuckerberg said he plans to invest billions into Meta’s AI efforts. In recent weeks, the 41-year-old tech mogul has managed to poach AI talent like Apple’s Mark Lee and Ruoming Pang among others at hefty packages for the Superintelligence Labs team.

In June, Meta acquired a 49 percent stake in Scale AI and appointed its CEO Alexandr Wang as the chief AI officer at Superintelligence Labs. Wang has also welcomed Zhao to the team.

The 41-year-old Facebook founder is presently getting several multi-gigawatt superclusters created in different parts of the U.S. for AI computation. The first one of these superclusters named “Prometheus” is expected to go live in 2026.