BIG BLOW to OpenAI's Sam Altman, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg hires ChatGPT creator Shengjia Zhao, set to lead...

In an aggressive race of Artificial intelligence supremacy, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has appointed co-creator of ChatGPT and an ex OpenAI research scientist as the Chief Scientist of its newly formed Superintelligence Labs. This comes amid, Mark Zuckerberg's luring of AI experts from Apple, OpenAI and google minds to join the Lab, by offering them staggering paychecks. Meta has also acquired ScaleAI with staggering $14 billion, whose founder Alexandr Wang now serves as Meta’s Chief AI Officer.  

Who is Shengjia Zhao?

Shengjia Zhao, an ex-employee of Sam Altman's OpnAI, is the mind behind ChatGPT, GPT-4 and OpenAI's mini-models including GPT-4.1 and o3. Now, he is all set to lead Meta's most ambitious research works, i.e 'Atificial superintelligence (ASI)'. 

Shengjia Zhao is an AI research expert, who did his bachelor's from Tsinghua Univeristy. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is also a co-author of the original ChatGPT research paper. He is also credited for building OpenAI's first reasoning model, o1 (a trailblaxing architecture, that popularized 'chain-of-thought; reasoning). This o1, is now used in major AI firms like Google, xAI, DeepSeek, etc.

Mark Zuckerberg on Shengjia Zhao

Shengjia Zhao is among the top AI talent hired by Mark Zuckerberg. he clarified that Zhao has co-founded Meta’s new AI lab and has been leading its scientific direction from the beginning. Zhao will now work directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, Meta’s new chief AI officer.

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

"I am very excited to take up the role as chief scientist of Meta superintelligence labs. Looking forward to building ASI and aligning it to empower people with the amazing team here. Let's build!," said Shengjia Zhao on Social media.

 July 25, 2025

What is Meta's Superintelligence Labs

Mark Zuckerberg is forming a new Superintelligence lab, co-founded by Shengjia Zhao and led by ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. He is planning to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” in compute infrastructure over the next decade. This will house all foundational model research deelopements, Llama family of open-source AI models and other long-term AI initiatives.  

As per reports, Meta has hired Apple's Ruoming Pang with massive $200 million pay package, OpenAI’s Trapit Bansal with a $100 million package, for the Superintelligence labs. Mark has also extended salary packages of up to Rs 1,600 crore to some new hires in the artificial intelligence. In this Superintelligence lab, Meta's compensation packages include a base salary, a signing bonus, and a substantial portion in Meta stock, with equity forming the bulk of the deal, according to the Bloomberg report.