Zuckerberg names ChatGPT co-creator head of Meta Superintelligence Labs

Meta (Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg has named Shengjia Zhao, one of the co-creators of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs.

“Shengjia co-founded the new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads on Friday. “Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.”

“Together we are building an elite, talent-dense team that has the resources and long-term focus to push the frontiers of superintelligence,” he added.

Meta hired Zhao, along with several other researchers from OpenAI, including Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Hongyu Ren, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, last month.

Other significant hires for Meta Superintelligence Labs include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI startup founder Daniel Gross, and Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang, who was named Meta’s chief AI officer as part of a deal giving Meta a 49% stake in Scale, valued at $14.3B. Zhao is expected to report to Wang.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed on a podcast that Meta has offered his employees signing bonuses up to $100M—and even more in total compensation—to entice them to jump ship.

Meta has also recruited talent from Google (GOOG)(GOOGL) DeepMind, Apple (AAPL) and Anthropic. The unit is focused on achieving artificial general intelligence, which is an AI model capable of performing at a human-like level across a broad range of tasks. The next step would be superintelligence, which would represent another jump in capabilities.