Meta announced that it has recruited Shengjia Zhao, a former key researcher at OpenAI, as chief scientist of Meta's Superintelligence lab, and will lead the team to create a new AI technology development route, hoping to gain a stronger voice in this global AI arms race.
Prior to this, Meta had already recruitedWang Tao, founder of Scale AI Alexandr Wang joined its team and invested in Scale AI, founded by Wang Tao. Recently, it was reported that it planned to acquire AI voice startupPlayAI, thereby accelerating the expansion of artificial intelligence.
TechCrunch website reportRefers toMeta's recruitment is not just a simple expansion of technical talents, but also a major strategic deployment of "talent armament". Zhao Shengjia is not only a core member of OpenAI's early founding, but also participated in the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the o1 model whose details have not yet been made public. These models have brought key advancements to the current development of AI technology.
Zhao Shengjia will join the Meta team and become the chief scientist of Meta Super Intelligence Lab, and will participate in the team leadership from the early stage of the organization. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also personally posted on ThreadsAnnounceThis news also emphasized that Zhao Shengjia is the core leader of Meta Super Intelligence Laboratory's technology route.
I am very excited to take up the role of chief scientist for meta super-intelligence labs. Looking forward to building asi and aligning it to empower people with the amazing team here. Let's build!
— Shengjia Zhao (@shengjia_zhao) July 25, 2025
We are excited to announce that @shengjia_zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs!
Shengjia is a brilliant scientist who most recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research. He will lead our scientific direction for our team.
Let's go 🚀 pic.twitter.com/D93KQWIvFl
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) July 25, 2025
Prior to this, Meta Super Intelligence Laboratory was headed by Wang Tao, but since he was not an AI technology researcher, the addition of Zhao Shengjia formed a strong complement to the overall technology research and development direction.
Meta established the Super Intelligence Lab to focus on developing the next generation of AI models with "reasoning capabilities" to fill the gap that has not yet been able to match the OpenAI o1 model. It is generally believed that Zhao Shengjia's contribution to the development of o1 is the biggest key to attracting Meta to recruit him to join the team.
Meta is currently actively recruiting senior researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Apple, and Safe Superintelligence, and has launched a large-scale merger of technical talents. It is reported that Mark Zuckerberg even personally invited the target to his private estate in Lake Tahoe, USA for an interview, and offered an eight-digit or even nine-digit salary, and showed his strong determination to recruit them by giving them a limited time reply.
In terms of hardware resources, Meta is currently accelerating the expansion of its computing power base. It is expected that by 2026, the Meta Super Intelligence Laboratory will be able to use the "Prometheus" cloud computing cluster located in Ohio with a scale of up to 1GW (equivalent to the electricity of approximately 75 households), paving the way for training more advanced AI models.
Meta currently has three major departments in the field of AI, including the FAIR laboratory (led by Yann LeCun), which focuses on long-term basic research, the application-level AI product team, and the newly established Super Intelligence Laboratory. After Zhao Shengjia joined the team, Meta has obviously prepared the necessary advanced AI technology and R&D talents, and will further plan a super AI R&D blueprint that can compete with OpenAI and Google technology.
