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Meta has appointed Shengjia Zhao, a former OpenAI researcher and co‑creator of GPT‑4, as the Chief Scientist of its newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).
The announcement was made Friday by Mark Zuckerberg on Threads, noting Zhao will lead the lab’s scientific agenda alongside him and Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who Meta recently brought onboard as Chief AI Officer.
“I am very excited to take up the role of chief scientist for meta super-intelligence labs. Looking forward to building asi [artificial superintelligence] and aligning it to empower people with the amazing team here. Let’s build!” Zhao wrote in his own Threads post.
“Artificial superintelligence” is a nebulous term used in the AI industry to describe systems more powerful and capable than any today, beyond even the smartest humans, making them difficult to control.
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Zhao’s strong commercial AI background
Zhao, who previously worked at OpenAI, played a key role in the development of foundational models like GPT-4 and GPT-4o, according to arXiv system cards and research papers listing him as a co-author. He’s also known for his academic work on generative models and fair representations, with widely cited papers in venues like NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.
Zhao joins Meta amid a high-stakes hiring blitz across the AI industry. Over the past few months, Meta has poached researchers from OpenAI, Apple, Google, and Anthropic as part of a multibillion-dollar bet on superintelligence as CNN reported.
Meta recently invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, acquiring a 49% stake and bringing on Wang to lead the superintelligence effort. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman also joined the team.
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