ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao joins Meta as chief scientist of Superintelligence Labs

Mark Zuckerberg with Shengjia Zhao

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has appointed Shengjia Zhao — a key figure behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT — as the chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company’s newly-formed AI division. The announcement comes amid Meta’s aggressive push into artificial intelligence, including a multibillion-dollar talent acquisition spree and a $14 billion investment in Scale AI.

While Zhao’s name first appeared in a June memo listing prominent AI hires, Zuckerberg clarified on Friday that Zhao has co-founded Meta’s new AI lab and has been leading its scientific direction from the beginning. Zhao will now work directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO who now serves as Meta’s chief AI officer.

Zhao’s credentials are significant. In addition to co-creating ChatGPT, he contributed to OpenAI’s development of GPT-4, GPT-4.1, and the lightweight o3 models. He also led OpenAI’s synthetic data research — a critical component for training large language models efficiently.

“Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field,” Zuckerberg said in a social media post. “I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision.”

"I am very excited to take up the role as chief scientist of Meta superintelligence labs. Looking forward to building ASI and aligning it to empower people with the amazing team here. Let's build!," said Zhao in a post on Threads.

Meta Superintelligence Labs will house work on the Llama family of open-source AI models, foundational model research, and other long-term AI initiatives. The unit is expected to focus not just on products, but also on fundamental AI research aimed at pushing the boundaries of general intelligence.

Zuckerberg previously stated that Meta plans to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” in compute infrastructure over the next decade to support these efforts.

With Zhao’s leadership and Meta’s massive commitment to AI, the company is clearly positioning itself to compete with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic in the race toward superintelligence.