Meta taps ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao to lead its Superintelligence Lab, signaling a bold push toward AGI dominance in the AI arms race.
In a major stride toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), Meta has officially appointed Shengjia Zhao—a former lead scientist at OpenAI and co-creator of ChatGPT and GPT-4—as Chief Scientist of its newly launched Superintelligence Lab. This high-stakes appointment signals Meta’s deepening commitment to becoming a frontrunner in the AI arms race, and Zhao will play a central role in defining the future of intelligence.
Working under Meta’s Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang—who joined the company in June following Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI—Zhao will spearhead the lab’s scientific vision. His mandate: to set the agenda and guide research directly toward the holy grail of AI development—AGI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed Zhao’s leadership, noting, “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’ve decided to formalize his leadership role.”
Zuckerberg also clarified that this new Superintelligence Lab will operate independently from Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) division, which is still led by renowned AI pioneer Yann LeCun. This structural shift hints at Meta’s strategy to diversify and specialize its AI efforts, allowing the Superintelligence Lab to focus exclusively on long-term AGI breakthroughs.
The move comes amid Meta’s aggressive AI expansion strategy, which includes cutting-edge infrastructure projects like the Prometheus and Hyperion data center clusters, and high-profile talent raids across Silicon Valley’s top AI firms. Industry insiders note that Meta has recently been recruiting top minds from OpenAI, DeepMind, Google, Apple, and Anthropic—with compensation offers ranging from eight to nine figures and deadlines as short as a few days.
Zhao’s hiring is widely viewed as a power move in the escalating AI talent war. His extensive research credentials and direct experience building advanced language models make him a formidable addition to Meta’s AI brain trust. “This is Meta doubling down on superintelligence,” one industry analyst commented. “With Shengjia Zhao at the helm, the company is sending a clear message: it wants to lead the next era of AI.”
As the race for AGI intensifies, Meta’s new lab—backed by capital, compute, and elite brainpower—may become the proving ground for the next leap in artificial intelligence.
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