Meta names Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist of AI superintelligence unit

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will lead research efforts at the new AI unit of the company, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao has contributed to various of the largest breakthroughs in OpenAi, including Chatgpt, GPT-4, and the first AI reasoning model of the company, O1.

“I am pleased to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the most important scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs,” said Zuckerberg in a Post on threads Friday. “Shengjia was co-founder of the new lab and has been our main scientist from the first day. Now that our recruitment is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leading role.”

Zhao will set a research agenda for MSL under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who has recently been adopted to lead the new unit.

Wang, who has no research background, was seen as a somewhat unconventional choice to lead an AI lab. The addition of Zhao, a reputable research leader who is known for the development of frontier AI models, completed the leadership team. To further fill in the unit, Meta has hired various researchers at a high level of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Safe Superintelligence, Apple and Anthropic, and researchers from the existing fundamental AI Research (Fair) Lab and generative AI unit of Meta.

Zuckerberg notes in his post that Zhao Pionier with various breakthroughs, including a “new scale paradigm”. The Meta CEO probably refers to Zhao’s work to the Reasoning Model of OpenAi, O1, in which it is mentioned as a fundamental contribution alongside OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutkever. Meta currently does not offer a competitor to O1, so AI reasoning models are an important area of attention for MSL.

The information reported in June Zhao would become a member of Meta Superintelligence LabsIn addition to three other influential OpenAi researchers – Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi and Hongyu Ren. Meta has also recruited Trapit Bansal, another OpenAI researcher who worked on AI -Redeneer models with ZHAO, as well as three employees of the Office of OpenAi’s Zurich who worked on multimodality.

Zuckerberg has put a lot of effort into setting up MSL for success. The Meta -CEO has been to a recruitment match to set up its AI Superintelligence Lab, where personal E emails are sent to researchers and invited prospects to his estate on the Tahoe Lake Tahoe. Meta reportedly offered a few researchers of eight and nine digits, compensation packages, some of which are “exploding offers” who will expire within a few days.

Meta has also increased its investment in cloud computing infrastructure, so that MSL should perform the massive training runs that are needed to make competitive AI models.

By 2026, the researchers of ZHAO and MSL must have access to the 1 Gigawatt Cloud Computing Cluster of Meta, Prometheus, based in Ohio. Online Meta will be one of the first technology companies with an AI training cluster of the Size of Prometheus – 1 Gigawatt is sufficient energy to provide electricity more than 750,000 houses. That should help Meta carry out the massive training runs that are needed to make frontier AI models.

With the addition of Zhao, Meta now has two chief AI scientists, including Yann Lecun, the leader of the Fair Lab of Meta. In contrast to MSL, Fair has been designed to concentrate on AI research in the long term techniques that can be used in five to 10 years. Exactly how the three AI units of Meta will work together is still to be seen.

Nevertheless, Meta now seems to have a formidable AI leadership team to compete with OpenAi and Google.