Meta Recruit ChatGPT Creator As AI Scientist Superintelligence

New recruits for Meta Superintelligence Labs

META CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced a new recruit who will lead researchers and artificial intelligence (AI) research in the new division of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). The person is Shengjia Zhao, a former OpenAI researcher. This announcement marks an important step in the META strategy to increase its capacity in AI technology development.

Zhao is known as one of the important figures behind Openai’s great achievements. He is a scientist who was directly involved in the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4, as well as their first AI reasoning model, O1. His expertise and contribution in the field of AI is highly appreciated by many parties, including by other large companies.

“I am proud to announce that Shengjia Zhao is the Chief Scientist of Superintelligence Labs Meta,” Zuckerberg wrote in a thread, Friday (25/7). He also mentioned that Zhao co-founded this lab from the start and has been the main scientist since the first day. After the MSL team began to form and the recruitment process went smoothly, Zhao’s position as the research leader was finally officially established.

Zhao will set up MSL’s research agenda under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI. Although Wang has no background as a researcher, the presence of Zhao who is known as an AI researcher will form a more solid leadership combination. Thus, MSL will have a strong and competitive management structure.

key research team who joined META

Meta also attracted a number of top researchers from various well-known companies such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Apple, Anthropic, to their internal research units such as Fair and the Generative AI Division. This recruitment process is carried out intensively and demonstrates META’s commitment to building a strong AI team.

Zuckerberg stressed that Zhao had created many important breakthroughs, including the new scaling paradigm in the development of the AI model. This is thought to refer to Zhao’s contribution to the AI O1 reasoning model, with him listed as the main contributor along with one of the founders of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever. Zhao’s deep understanding of AI made it the ideal choice to lead MSL.

Previously, Zhao had been rumored to be joining the Meta Superintelligence Labs with three well-known scientists from Openai, namely Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. In addition, META also recruits Bansal Trapit, which has collaborated with Zhao in the development of the AI reasoning model, as well as a number of researchers from the OpenAI office in Zurich.

Intensive recruitment process

To ensure the success of MSL, Zuckerberg dropped directly in the recruitment process. He even sent a personal email to the candidates and invited them to his private villa in Lake Tahoe. Reportedly, META offers fantastic value compensation packages, reaching eight to nine digits, and a number of other large benefits. This step shows how serious META is in recruiting the best talent in the AI field.

Large investments are also made on the cloud computing infrastructure side. META is building a giant AI computing cluster called Prometheus in Ohio, which is scheduled to operate in 2026. This cluster will produce 1 gigawatt of power, enough to turn on 750,000 houses, and is designed to run competitive large-scale AI training at the Global.

AI Research Structure in Meta

With the joining of Zhao, Meta now has two main AI scientists, Zhao who leads MSL and Yann Lecun who leads Fair (Fundamental AI Research). While Fair focuses on long-term research, the results of which will only be seen in the next 5 to 10 years, MSL has focused on developing a practical and competitive AI Frontier model in the near future.

How the three AI Meta units will work together is still unclear. But one thing is for sure, META now has a strong AI team, ready to challenge the dominance of OpenAI and Google in the artificial intelligence race.