Meta Platforms has named Shengjia Zhao, one of the creators of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as the chief scientist of its newly formed superintelligence lab.

The announcement was made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg through a Threads post.

The Facebook-parent recently launched the Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) to centralise efforts on its Llama models and support its long-term goals for artificial general intelligence.

Alexandr Wang, formerly the CEO of Scale AI, is serving as the chief AI officer of MSL, while Nat Friedman, the ex-CEO of GitHub, is co-leading the division.

“In this role, Shengjia will set the research agenda and scientific direction for our new lab working directly with me and Alex,” Zuckerberg stated in the social media post.

Zhao, who previously worked as a research scientist at OpenAI, played a significant role in the creation of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and other models such as 4.1 and o3, according to a Reuters report.

“Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field,” Zuckerberg further mentioned in his post. “I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision.”

In recent weeks, Meta has attracted several researchers from OpenAI as it seeks to advance its capabilities in AI. It also poached Ruoming Pang, Apple’s top executive responsible for AI models, earlier this month.

Zuckerberg has expressed Meta’s ambition to develop ‘full general intelligence’ and to release its work as open source. He has already unveiled plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into building extensive AI data centres.

The company’s first multi-gigawatt data centre supercluster, named Prometheus, is expected to go online by 2026.