Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that Shengjia Zhao, known for his work on GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model at OpenAI, will officially lead research at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) as Chief Scientist. Zhao co-founded MSL and had been serving informally in the role since the lab’s inception.

Zuckerberg’s Threads post highlighted Zhao’s leadership and contributions to breakthroughs in AI scaling. Zhao will now lead MSL’s scientific efforts under Alexandr Wang, the lab’s director and former CEO of Scale AI.

Zhao joins MSL with other top AI researchers from OpenAI, signaling Meta’s intention to compete aggressively in the frontier AI space. The lab’s upcoming Prometheus computing cluster will provide the infrastructure needed to support large-scale training efforts.

With this appointment, Meta’s AI leadership now includes both Zhao and Yann LeCun. While LeCun leads the FAIR division focusing on long-term research, Zhao’s MSL is centered on short- to mid-term advances in reasoning models and superintelligence.