Meta appoints Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT, as Chief Scientist in the AI Superintelligence division
Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) Takes Shape with Key Hires and Ambitious Plans
Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is making a significant push into artificial intelligence (AI) with the establishment of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). The new AI unit, announced earlier this year, is headed by Shengjia Zhao, a former researcher at OpenAI, as chief scientist, and Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, as a key leader.
Shengjia Zhao, who co-founded MSL and has been its lead scientist since its inception, has contributed to some of OpenAI's major breakthroughs, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the company's first AI reasoning model, o1. His work on o1 has earned him recognition as a foundational contributor, alongside OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Meta has also recruited Trapit Bansal, another OpenAI researcher who worked on AI reasoning models with Shengjia Zhao.
The focus of MSL is on building cutting-edge foundation AI models like Llama, advancing AI architecture and inference research, and developing personal superintelligence aimed at empowering individuals rather than automating all work. This aligns with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of AI as a human-centric tool that functions as an extension of oneself, contrasting with competitors who focus on centralized automation and mass replacement.
Meta's investment in MSL is substantial. The company has invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, bringing CEO Alexandr Wang onboard, and plans to invest "hundreds of billions of dollars" into AI compute infrastructure over the next few years. This includes expanding their cloud computing capacity with a 1 gigawatt cloud computing cluster, Prometheus, located in Ohio, by 2026.
In addition to this, Meta has been on a recruitment spree for MSL, with Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Hongyu Ren, and three other influential OpenAI researchers joining the team. The company has also recruited employees from OpenAI's Zurich office who worked on multimodality.
The lab is a central part of Meta's massive AI investment strategy, supported by significant capital expenditure—up to $72 billion in 2025 alone—targeted at expanding AI infrastructure including data centers and superclusters with immense compute power such as Prometheus in Ohio and Hyperion in Louisiana.
Meta's ambitious plans for MSL are evident in their focus on rapid deployment of AI infrastructure with new datacenter designs prioritizing speed and efficiency to scale AI compute capabilities quickly. The company aims to position itself as a leading AI innovator through both research and infrastructure investments.
Zuckerberg has stated that the next few years are going to be very exciting for AI development at Meta, and with the talent and resources at their disposal, it seems that the tech giant is well on its way to realizing this vision.
Shengjia Zhao, the lead scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), has contributed significantly to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and OpenAI's first AI reasoning model, o1. Meta's focus with MSL is not only on building foundation AI models like Llama, but also on developing personal superintelligence, aiming to empower individuals through AI technology.
