On Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Threads to announce that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will step into the role of Chief Scientist at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao, who co‑founded the new unit and has been its lead scientist since day one, will now formally set the lab’s research agenda alongside Meta’s Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang. This move signals Meta’s intensifying push into frontier AI, as it races rivals like OpenAI and Google to develop ever more powerful models.

Zhao brings a stellar résumé to MSL. At OpenAI, he was a foundational contributor to ChatGPT and GPT-4 and helped pioneer the company’s first AI reasoning model, o1. His work on “new scaling paradigms” underpins today’s chain‑of‑thought approaches, making him one of the most sought‑after minds in AI research.

Although Wang—Meta’s former Scale AI CEO—oversees MSL’s overall strategy, his lack of a deep research background made the addition of Zhao a masterstroke. He’ll chart the scientific roadmap for the unit, translating big-picture ambitions into concrete experiments and breakthroughs.

Meta has been on a full‑court press to staff MSL with top talent. Since the lab’s inception, the company has lured dozens of senior researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Safe Superintelligence, Apple, Anthropic, and its own FAIR and generative‑AI teams. Recruiters, reportedly armed with eight‑ and nine‑figure “exploding offers,” have flown prospects to Zuckerberg’s Lake Tahoe estate, tapped personal networks, and dangled enviable stock packages—and it’s clearly paying off.

Behind the scenes, Meta is buttressing its computing backbone to match its talent haul. Later this year, MSL researchers will gain access to “Prometheus,” Meta’s 1‑gigawatt AI‑training cluster in Ohio—one of the first of its scale in the tech industry. By powering massive model‑training runs, Prometheus could give Meta the edge it needs to close the gap on its competitors.

Zhao’s appointment also reshapes the AI leadership landscape at Meta. He joins Yann LeCun—FAIR’s Chief Scientist—in what are now two distinct chief‑scientist roles. While LeCun continues to focus on long‑term, foundational research, Zhao will zero in on near‑term milestones and the nuts‑and‑bolts of building next‑gen superintelligent systems. How MSL, FAIR, and Meta’s product teams will interlock their efforts remains one of the industry’s most intriguing organizational puzzles.

With Zhao now at the helm of its superintelligence ambitions, Meta has assembled a formidable triad—Zuckerberg setting vision, Wang driving execution, and Zhao leading the science. Whether this leadership alchemy can deliver breakthroughs that rival the likes of GPT-5 or Google’s Gemini Ultra, only time will tell. But one thing is clear: Meta is dead serious about winning the next phase of the AI arms race.