Meta Names ChatGPT Co-Creator Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist of Superintelligence Lab

Meta Platforms has appointed Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT, as chief scientist of its Superintelligence Lab, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, as the company accelerates its push into advanced AI.

"In this role, Shengjia will set the research agenda and scientific direction for our new lab working directly with me and Alex," Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post, referring to Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who Zuckerberg hired from startup Scale AI when Meta took a big stake in it.

Zhao, a former research scientist at OpenAI, co-created ChatGPT, GPT-4 and several of OpenAI's mini models, including 4.1 and o3.

He is among several researchers who have moved from OpenAI to Meta in recent weeks, part of a broader talent arms race as Zuckerberg aggressively hires from rivals to close the gap in advanced AI. Meta has been offering some of Silicon Valley's most lucrative pay packages and striking startup deals to attract top researchers, a strategy that follows the underwhelming performance of its Llama 4 model.

Meta launched the Superintelligence Lab recently to consolidate work on its Llama models and long‑term artificial general intelligence ambitions. Zhao is a co-founder of the lab, according to the Threads post, which operates separately from FAIR, Meta's established AI research division led by deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun.

Zuckerberg has said Meta aims to build “full general intelligence” and release its work as open source — a strategy that has drawn both praise and concern within the AI community.

© Thomson Reuters 2025