Who is Shengjia Zhao? ChatGPT co-creator named Chief Scientist at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday announced that his company’s new Superinteligence Labs has appointed ChatGPT co-creator Shenjia Zhao as the chief scientist. In the new role, Zhao will set the research agenda and the newly setup AI lab while also set the scientific direction and report directly to Meta Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang.
Announcing the new appointment in a post on Threads, Zuckerberg wrote, “Shengjia co-founded the new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one. Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.”
“Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field. I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision.” he added
Ever since the dull reception received Meta’s latest Llama model releases in April, Mark Zuckerberg has been working on getting the company back to the frontline of the highly contested AI race first with the $14 billion acquisition of Scale AI and later with the start of new organizaton called Meta Superintelligence Labs that has been wooing talent away from top AI companies like OpenAI, Google and even Apple.
Who is Shengia Zhao?
Zhao was among the dozen or so employees that left OpenAI for Meta in the past months. He is also the co-autor of the original ChatGPT research paper and was a key researcher on the first OpenAI reasoning model o1, according to a Bloomberg report.
OpenAI’s o1 model popularized the category of reasoning models and saw a bunch of other similar models with “chain of thought” from Google, DeepSeek, xAI and more.
According to a previous memo from Zuckerberg, Zhao handled synthetic data at OpenAI before coming to Meta. He also holds a bachelors degree from Tsinghua University and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.
