Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao would be the chief scientist at the tech giant’s new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).
Zhao has contributed to many of OpenAI’s biggest breakthroughs including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the company’s first AI reasoning model, o1.
“I’m excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs,” Zuckerberg said via Threads. “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.”
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Zhao will work under former Scale CEO Alexandr Wang, who is heading the superintelligence unit. He has been seen as a rather unconventional choice for the role, as he doesn’t have a research background.
Zuckerberg had also noted in his post that Zhao had pioneered several breakthroughs including “a new scaling paradigm.” He is likely talking about Zhao’s work on OpenAI’s reasoning model o1, in which he is listed as a foundational contributor alongside OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. AI reasoning models would likely be a key area of focus for MSL, since Meta doesn’t currently offer a competitor to o1.
MSL will be working on foundation models such as the open-source Llama family of AI models, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research projects.
Meta has recently been on a recruitment spree for MSL. Zhao had originally joined MSL along with three other influential OpenAI researchers — Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. The company had also recruited Trapit Bansal, another OpenAI researcher who worked on AI reasoning models with Zhao, as well as three employees from OpenAI’s Zurich office who worked on multimodality. Reports in June stated that Meta offered employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind compensation packages worth upwards of $100 million.
Zuckerberg also stated Meta will invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into AI compute infrastructure. “The next few years are going to be very exciting!” he wrote on Friday.
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Meta has also increased its investment in cloud computing infrastructure, which should help MSL conduct the massive training runs required to create competitive frontier AI models.
By 2026, MSL would also have access to Meta’s 1 gigawatt cloud computing cluster, Prometheus, located in Ohio. This would make Meta one of the first tech companies with an AI training cluster of Prometheus’ size — 1 gigawatt is enough energy to power more than 750,000 homes. That should help Meta conduct the massive training runs required to create frontier AI models.