Meta Platforms has appointed Shengjia Zhao—co-creator of ChatGPT and GPT-4—as chief scientist of the company’s newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced on 25 July. Zhao joined Meta from OpenAI in June and now becomes a co-founder of the unit, where he will set the research agenda and report directly to Zuckerberg and Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI chief executive. The Superintelligence Labs were created this year to consolidate work on Meta’s Llama models and longer-term ambitions for artificial general intelligence. The group operates separately from Meta’s Fundamental AI Research division, which continues to be led by deep-learning pioneer Yann LeCun. Zhao’s appointment gives Meta a second top-level AI scientist and is intended to bolster the company’s credentials after the mixed reception of its Llama 4 model. Zuckerberg has said Meta will invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” in computing infrastructure to build superintelligence and has already spent about $14.3 billion for a 49 % stake in Scale AI. The hire of Zhao, alongside recent recruits from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, underscores an intensifying talent race as large technology firms seek to dominate the next generation of frontier AI systems.