Mark Zuckerberg has formally confirmed the appointment of Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao, who was involved in developing OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the o1 reasoning model, will now lead Meta’s most advanced AI research efforts.

Zhao co-founded MSL and has been central to shaping its vision. He will work alongside Alexandr Wang, who leads the unit. The team also includes several other former OpenAI employees who recently joined Meta, such as Trapit Bansal and multiple engineers from Zurich focused on multimodal AI.

Reasoning models remain a core priority for MSL, as Meta positions itself to rival OpenAI’s leadership in this field. Zhao’s experience in scaling such systems is expected to be instrumental in accelerating Meta’s development timelines.

By 2026, the lab will begin using Prometheus, Meta’s massive 1-gigawatt compute cluster located in Ohio, to train next-generation AI models. Zhao’s role complements that of Yann LeCun, who continues to lead Meta’s FAIR lab in parallel.