Meta AI revolution gains momentum as it hires the co-creator of ChatGPT
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a bold move that reflects the high-stakes nature of his company entering the AI frontier has named Shengjia Zhao, co-founder of OpenAI ChatGPT, to be the new chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. As CNBC and Zuckerberg himself said in a personal statement, this hiring is not a mere talent acquisition, it is a statement of Meta aiming to win the artificial intelligence race.
The news further stokes Meta AI growth, which saw the company spend \$14 billion on Scale AI and establish a new lab dedicated to sophisticated AI models and research: Meta Superintelligence Labs. Having Zhao in his team, Zuckerberg is hoping to base the future of Meta on superintelligent systems that can redefine the possibilities of AI.
OpenAI to Meta: Why Shengjia Zhao is so important
The name of Zhao was mentioned in a previous June memo as one of the members of Meta new AI team, but it was Zuckerberg who formally announced on Friday that Zhao was not only a member, but a co-founder of Meta Superintelligence Labs and has been serving as chief scientist since the very first day. His experience is as impressive as it is innovative: Zhao was involved in the development of OpenAI GPT-4, GPT-4 Mini, GPT-4.1, and O3 models. Also, he was the head of the Artificial Data division at OpenAI, which is a critical component of training generative AI models using synthetic data.
Zhao now answers to Zuckerberg and Alexander Wang, former Scale AI CEO, who is now Meta Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer. It is a force of three that combines in-depth AI engineering, top-level strategy, and massive financial support all within the growing empire of Meta.
According to Zuckerberg on his social media account, Shengjia has led many accomplishments such as a new model of scaling, and it has become a leader in the field. I am excited to work with him closely in order to promote his scientific vision.
Meta Superintelligence Labs: Next AI Research Hub
Meta Superintelligence Labs is not merely a rebranding of Meta AI team, but a long-term, focused attempt to build foundational AI models. These are the continued development of Meta open-source Llama series, and completely new architectures to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Though the Llama models already demonstrated the potential to become powerful open-source alternatives to commercial large language models, Zuckerberg has bigger plans than simply catching up to the competition. Under the leadership of Zhao, Meta Superintelligence Labs can develop models that may be better than the most powerful AI systems currently.
The work in the lab will allegedly cover several frontiers of AI: multimodal reasoning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning based on human feedback (RLHF), and AI safety, as the key areas that need to be converged to achieve superintelligent agents.
Huge Investment is an Indicator of Long-term Vision
The hiring frenzy and lab unveiling by Zuckerberg is part of a larger financial investment, which overshadows most technological research and development. In a statement made earlier this month, Meta is ready to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the next few years. Such investments will include compute clusters, neural training pipelines, and the people needed to innovate at the edge of AI research.
Unlike most companies that are investing in more immediate applications such as chatbots or image generation, Meta is betting big on the long-term-building fundamental models that can support a variety of next-generation products and interfaces across the family of apps and hardware platforms that the company offers.
The future of social media, AR/VR in the metaverse, or enterprise AI solutions, Zuckerberg is placing his bets on Meta Superintelligence Labs as the foundation stone.
What This Means to the Ecosystem of AI
The hiring of one of the ChatGPT co-creators is not just a major news to Meta, but to the whole sphere of AI. It marks a bigger trend in the AI talent war, where the best and brightest are now drawn to the biggest wins rather than just staying at the early players like OpenAI or Google DeepMind.
Besides, the relocation of Zhao represents the increasing popularity of platforms that provide a wider scientific freedom, open-source aspiration, and scaled resources. As OpenAI has moved its mission to enterprise and alignment, it seems that Meta is shaping a lane on pure innovation and open research.
The ripple impact? Competitor tech companies will most likely start to raise their own AI investments and change their talent strategies to keep up. The race to compute, data, and intellectual leadership in AI is intense than ever.
Conclusion: Meta is Bets Big on Scalable Intelligence
By starting Meta Superintelligence Labs, Mark Zuckerberg is not only entering the AI race, he is staging a power play to dominate it. Supported by the engineering history of Zhao and a blank-check investment strategy, Meta is also betting on superintelligence, which is part of a bigger vision: the next platform revolution is not going to be mobile, not going to be social, not even going to be virtual reality, it is going to be AI.
As Zuckerberg put it, “The next few years are going to be very exciting!”
And with talent like Zhao on board, it’s clear that Meta plans to not just participate in the future of AI, but to shape it from the front.
