New Delhi: Meta has hired a former OpenAI researcher, Shengjia Zhao, to be the chief scientist of its newly established Superintelligence AI Lab, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed. Zhao, who was one of the authors of the original ChatGPT paper and the co-designer of OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1, is now taking a critical lead position in the most ambitious AI project of the tech giant ever.
Zhao slipped into a department at Meta in June and will report to the former Scale AI CEO, Alexandr Wang, who is now the Chief AI Officer at Meta. This is an indication of the increasing ambition by Meta to become the leader in the worldwide quest to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), with Zhao assuming responsibility for setting research directions at the Superintelligence Lab, independent of Meta, which has an older AI group, FAIR.
We’re excited to have @shengjia_zhao at the helm as Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Big things are coming! 🚀
See Mark’s post: https://t.co/SL7h4sGfwx pic.twitter.com/DRnpqBe1wD
— AI at Meta (@AIatMeta) July 25, 2025
A strategic shift in AI leadership
This change of leadership shifts AI veteran Yann LeCun to a minor role, reporting now to Wang, though still in charge of FAIR. The new organisation of the AI division places Wang in charge of both FAIR and the Superintelligence Lab, as Meta lays the foundation of a two-pronged approach to AGI. In one of the posts on Threads, Zuckerberg confirmed the promotion of Zhao, terming him as our lead scientist since day one.
The recent reorganisation at Meta shows that the company is determined to narrow the gap between it and such rivals as OpenAI and Google, the models of which are more advanced than the open-source LLaMA 4 provided by Meta. That might soon change with the next major bet by Meta, a super-powered model called internally Behemoth, which could come out later in 2025.
Zhao joins a growing list of high-profile hires
It is not only Zhao who switches to being a top researcher. In the past few months alone, Meta has allegedly hired more than a dozen scientists that previously worked at OpenAI, Apple, Anthropic, and Google. Those are Zhao’s ex-colleagues Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren, OpenAI Zurich engineers, and Trapit Bansal, another reasoning expert.
The Meta recruitment spree has been a personal initiative by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He has gone directly to candidates, in some cases taking them to his Lake Tahoe estate to meet, according to reports. The company has been providing huge compensation packages, some of which run into eight or nine figures, with exploding offers to get quick decisions.
The race to superintelligence is on
Meta is making long bets on talent and infrastructure, even though it is currently playing catch-up in the race to create the latest AI model. Zuckerberg said, “We are making a top-tier, talent-rich team,” which clearly shows that Meta is determined to be at the forefront of the next AI frontier.
The company is in a good position to become the epicentre of the next big jump in artificial intelligence, with Zhao now in the forefront and Meta investing heavily in its Superintelligence Lab.