Who is Shengjia Zhao? Brain behind designing ChatGPT, now became Chief scientist of…, his salary is…
Former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao has been appointed as the Chief Scientist of Meta’s newly launched Superintelligence Lab, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last Friday.
This comes after he collected all the top talents from the industry for his prized AI team. The Superintelligence Lab, his dream project, is garnering a lot of attention from around the world for poaching the top AI talent, with astronomical salary figures. He has now confirmed Shengjia Zhao, the co-creator of ChatGPT as the Chief Scientist of his extremely prized MSL.
What Mark Zuckerberg said?
In a post on Threads, Zuckerberg introduced the scientist’s addition to the team, “I’m excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. In this role, Shengjia will set the research agenda and scientific direction for our new lab working directly with me and Alex,” he wrote.
“Shengjia co-founded the new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one. Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role. Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field. I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision,” he added.
Who is this genius?
Zhao is a genius with many achievements, he has been awarded multiple times, has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, and is a complete overachiever.
With an impressive track record in the AI industry, he has co-created not only ChatGPT but also GPT-4 and several of OpenAI’s mini models, including GPT-4.1 and GPT-o3.
His recruitment is part of a broader trend of researchers transitioning from OpenAI to Meta in recent weeks because Meta is reportedly offering highly astronomical compensation packages and deals to attract top AI researchers.
According to industry experts, this strategy is aimed on closing the gap to the leading AI models from rivals like OpenAI and Google after Meta’s Llama 4 model was expected to take the battle to OpenAI, but was greeted with underwhelming performance.
All about Meta’s new lab
Meta’s Superintelligence lab was launched by Meta in order to not only enhance the Llama AI model, but also so it can advance its long-term ambitions in the field. According to the post made by Zuckerberg, Zhao is a co-founder of this new lab, all while being a part of the FAIR AI research division, which was led by Yann LeCun, the deep learning pioneer. MSL operates independently from FAIR.
Meta has poured billions into hiring top talent from rivals, which include Google, OpenAI, Apple, and Anthropic. The company also acquired Scale AI for $14 billion, bringing its CEO, Alexandr Wang, on board as Meta’s Chief AI Officer. Showing the commitment of Zuckerberg of investing hundreds of billions more in building vast AI data centres across the US.
News