Meta, the tech giant formerly known as Facebook, is making significant strides in its artificial intelligence endeavors, demonstrated by the appointment of Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of OpenAI's ChatGPT, as the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. This strategic move signals Meta's ambition to lead the way in AI research and development, particularly in the realm of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Zhao's appointment comes at a crucial time for Meta, which is actively working to strengthen its AI capabilities. Following what some perceived as a lukewarm reception to its Llama model releases, Meta is keen to regain a leading position in the competitive AI landscape. To this end, the company has been investing heavily in AI talent acquisition, recruiting experts from other leading AI organizations such as Google, OpenAI, Apple, and Anthropic. Meta is also committing billions of dollars to build AI data centers across the United States, demonstrating its long-term investment in AI infrastructure.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced Zhao's appointment, highlighting his role in co-founding the new lab and serving as its lead scientist from day one. Zuckerberg emphasized that formalizing Zhao's leadership role reflects the progress in recruiting and team formation at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Zhao will be responsible for setting the lab's research agenda, defining its scientific direction, and reporting directly to Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.
Zhao's expertise extends beyond ChatGPT, as he also played a key role in developing GPT-4 and OpenAI's first AI reasoning model, o1. His work also includes contributions to mini models 4.1 and o3, as well as leading work on synthetic data. Zuckerberg praised Zhao as a "brilliant scientist" who has pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research.
Meta's commitment to AI extends beyond talent acquisition and infrastructure investment. The company's AI research division, Meta AI, has a long history of developing cutting-edge AI and augmented reality technologies. Meta AI's research spans a wide range of areas, including generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing, and AI infrastructure. The team is focused on enabling machines to understand and generate natural language, with the goal of creating chatbots that can communicate in multiple languages. Meta AI is also developing AI-powered tools for image and video creation, with the aim of boosting creativity and problem-solving capabilities.
The appointment of Zhao as Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs underscores Meta's determination to advance AI and develop AGI. Meta's superintelligence lab is a new organization that has been actively recruiting talent from top AI companies. The company's efforts to attract AI talent have been aggressive, with reports of Meta offering significant compensation packages to lure researchers from competitors.
Meta's pursuit of AI leadership also involved an attempt to acquire Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a $32 billion AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. However, Sutskever declined Meta's acquisition offer, leading Zuckerberg to shift his focus to hiring key executives from SSI. Daniel Gross, the CEO of SSI, and Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, are now set to join Meta, reporting to Alexandr Wang. Meta is also expected to acquire a stake in NFDG, the venture capital firm co-founded by Gross and Friedman.
The appointment of Shengjia Zhao and the recruitment of other AI experts reflect Meta's comprehensive strategy to strengthen its AI capabilities and achieve breakthroughs in AGI. Meta's continued investment in AI research, talent, and infrastructure positions the company as a major player in the ongoing AI revolution.
