Mark Zuckerberg Names OpenAI Veteran Shengjia Zhao As Chief Scientist Of Meta Superintelligence Labs

Meta Platforms Inc. META has officially named Shengjia Zhao, a former OpenAI researcher, as Chief Scientist of its newly formed Superintelligence Labs.

What Happened: On Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Zhao's appointment on Threads, highlighting his central role in building the company's new frontier AI unit.

"I'm excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs," Zuckerberg said in a memo he shared.

"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."

Zhao previously contributed to some of OpenAI's most significant breakthroughs, including ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the "o1" reasoning model.

At Meta Superintelligence Labs, Zhao will work under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, who was brought in to head the lab.

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Why It's Important: Meta has been ramping up infrastructure support for MSL, with Zhao and his team set to gain access by 2026 to Prometheus, a 1-gigawatt cloud computing cluster located in Ohio, reported TechCrunch.

With Zhao joining the team, Meta now has two top AI scientists, including Yann LeCun, who heads the company's FAIR lab.

FAIR, unlike MSL, is dedicated to long-term AI research, exploring methods that could come into play over the next five to ten years. However, it remains unclear how Meta plans to coordinate its three AI divisions, the report said.

Price Action: Meta shares declined by 0.30% on Friday but edged up 0.16% in after-hours trading, according to Benzinga Pro.

Benzinga's Edge Stock Rankings indicate that META continues to trend upward across short-, medium-, and long-term periods. More detailed performance data can be found here.