From OpenAI To Meta: All You Need To Know About Chief Scientist Shengjia Zhao

Shengjia Zhao, a former OpenAI researcher, has been appointed chief scientist of Meta's newly launched Superintelligence Lab, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last Friday.

Mr Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT and GPT-4, will work directly with Mr Zuckerberg and Meta's Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang, to steer the lab's scientific direction. He is also a co-founder of the lab, which aims to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) and improve Meta's Llama models.

Mark Zuckerberg said Meta was committed to building "full general intelligence" and releasing its research as open source.

Who Is Shengjia Zhao?

• Shengjia Zhao earned his Bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University in 2016, as per his LinkedIn profile. He completed a semester exchange in Computer Science at Rice University and then pursued a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University.
• Following his PhD, Mr Zhao joined OpenAI in June 2022 as a Member of Technical Staff, where he worked for over three years until July this year. During this time, he co-created ChatGPT, GPT-4, and several OpenAI mini models, including GPT-4.1 and o3. He has now been appointed as the Chief Scientist of Meta's Superintelligence Lab.
• Mr Zhao has received several prestigious awards. In 2015, he was awarded the Google Excellence Scholarship. Four years later, he received the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QinF) for his contributions to research in AI while at Stanford. The same year, Mr Zhao was named a JP Morgan PhD Fellow.
• In October 2022, he was honoured with the ICLR 2022 Outstanding Paper Award, one of the top recognitions in the machine learning research community.
• Mr Zhao currently lives in San Francisco, California. He is fluent in English and Mandarin.

Meta's Superintelligence Lab

The Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL) was launched by Meta to drive progress on its Llama models and pursue its broader goal of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). According to Mark Zuckerberg, Shengjia Zhao is a co-founder of the lab. While Meta's original AI research is led by Yann LeCun under the FAIR division, MSL operates independently.

Meta has poured billions into hiring top talent from rivals, including Google, OpenAI, Apple, and Anthropic. The company also acquired Scale AI for $14 billion, bringing its CEO, Alexandr Wang, on board as Meta's Chief AI Officer. Mr Zuckerberg has committed to investing hundreds of billions more in building vast AI data centres across the US.