Meta Platforms has named former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao chief scientist of its new Meta Superintelligence Labs, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced on 25 July. The appointment formalises Zhao’s role in the unit, which Meta created this year to develop frontier artificial-intelligence systems. Zhao co-created ChatGPT and GPT-4 and helped build OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model. He joined Meta in June and will now set MSL’s research agenda, reporting to Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI chief executive who became Meta’s chief AI officer earlier in 2025. The hire rounds out leadership at MSL and complements Meta’s existing Fundamental AI Research group led by Yann LeCun. Zuckerberg has been on an aggressive recruitment drive, luring researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Apple as he seeks to narrow the gap with rival AI labs. Meta is coupling its talent push with heavy infrastructure spending. The company plans to bring a one-gigawatt “Prometheus” training cluster in Ohio online by 2026, part of what Zuckerberg has described as “hundreds of billions of dollars” earmarked for AI compute over the next few years.