Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday introduced that his firm’s new Superintelligence Labs has appointed ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao because the chief scientist. Within the new function, Zhao will set the analysis agenda on the newly arrange AI lab, outline its scientific course, and report on to Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.
Saying the appointment in a put up on Threads, Zuckerberg wrote, “Shengjia co-founded the brand new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one. Now that our recruiting goes nicely and our staff is coming collectively, we’ve determined to formalize his management function.”
“Shengjia has already pioneered a number of breakthroughs, together with a brand new scaling paradigm, and distinguished himself as a frontrunner within the discipline. I am trying ahead to working carefully with him to advance his scientific imaginative and prescient,” he added.
Ever because the uninteresting reception of Meta‘s newest Llama mannequin releases in April, Mark Zuckerberg has been working to get the corporate again to the frontline of the extremely contested AI race—first with the $14 billion acquisition of Scale AI and later with the launch of a brand new organisation referred to as Meta Superintelligence Labs, which has been actively wooing expertise away from prime AI corporations like OpenAI, Google, and even Apple.
In the meantime, Zuckerberg additionally confirmed in the identical put up that Yann LeCun—the AI researcher who has labored on the firm for over a decade and holds the title of Chief Scientist—is staying at Meta. He’ll proceed because the chief scientist at an inside AI analysis group referred to as FAIR.
LeCun additionally issued a clarification on his place at Meta in a put up on LinkedIn, writing, “My function as Chief Scientist for FAIR has at all times been targeted on long-term AI analysis and constructing subsequent AI paradigms. My function and FAIR’s mission stay unchanged.”
Who’s Shengjia Zhao?
Zhao was amongst a dozen or so staff who left OpenAI for Meta in latest months. He’s additionally the co-author of the unique ChatGPT analysis paper and was a key researcher on the primary OpenAI reasoning mannequin, o1, in line with a Bloomberg report.
OpenAI’s o1 mannequin popularised the class of reasoning fashions and impressed a wave of comparable “chain-of-thought” fashions from Google, DeepSeek, xAI, and others.
In line with a earlier memo from Zuckerberg, Zhao dealt with artificial knowledge at OpenAI earlier than shifting to Meta. He additionally holds a bachelor’s diploma from Tsinghua College and a PhD in Laptop Science from Stanford College.