The appointment, confirmed by Zuckerberg in a social media post on Friday, marks a significant addition to Meta’s rapidly expanding AI leadership team. Zhao had previously been listed among several high-profile hires in a June internal memo, but Zuckerberg clarified that Zhao not only joined early but co-founded the lab and has “been our lead scientist from day one.”
“Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision.”
Zhao will collaborate directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO who now serves as Meta’s Chief AI Officer. The announcement comes amid Meta’s aggressive push into artificial intelligence, underscored by a $14 billion investment in Scale AI and plans to pour “hundreds of billions of dollars” into AI computing infrastructure over the next few years.
Before joining Meta, Zhao played a pivotal role at OpenAI, where he contributed to the development of ChatGPT, helped build GPT-4, and led efforts around synthetic data. He was also involved in the creation of GPT mini-models and iterations such as GPT-4.1 and GPT-o3.
Meta Superintelligence Labs, announced in June, is home to Meta’s foundational AI research and development. It leads work on large-scale AI models, including the open-source Llama family, as well as long-term research into general-purpose artificial intelligence systems.
The hiring of Zhao reflects Meta’s ambition to establish itself as a global leader in AI development, positioning the company to compete with top-tier research entities like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.
“The next few years are going to be very exciting!” Zuckerberg added, signaling Meta’s readiness to make long-term bets on the future of AI.