ChatGPT co-creator appointed head of Meta AI Superintelligence Lab

Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as the new chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. It is pertinent to note that Zhao was one of several strategic hires in Zuckerberg's multi-billion-dollar hiring spree.

In the announcement, Zuckerberg said that Zhao's name as the co-founder of Meta Superintelligence Labs and its lead scientist was locked in "from day one". “Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalise his leadership role,” he added.

The ChatGPT co-creator would directly report to Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, who is now Meta's chief AI officer. "Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs, including a new scaling paradigm,m and distinguished himself as a leader in the field," the Meta CEO said in a social media post.

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"I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision. The next few years are going to be very exciting!" he concluded.

The man behind ChatGPT

Apart from creating the renowned AI chatbot, Zhao has played an instrumental role in developing GPT-4, mini models, 4.1, and o3, CNBC reported. In the past, he has also led synthetic data efforts at an AI research company.

In a separate post, Wang also celebrated Zhao's inclusion in the team. “We are excited to announce that @shengjia_zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs! Shengjia is a brilliant scientist who most recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research. He will lead our scientific direction for our team," he wrote in a post.

The announcement came just months after reports emerged that Meta has spent billions of dollars hiring AI talents from Google, OpenAI, Apple and Anthropic.

Apart from this, the tech giant also acquired ScaleAI for a whopping $14 billion and made its CEO Meta's chief AI officer. Zuckerberg made it clear that his company would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building huge AI data centres in the US. Hence, it will be interesting to see how Meta performs in an already competitive market.