Who is Shengjia Zhao? Meet Meta’s New Superintelligence Chief and Former OpenAI Scientist

Shengjia Zhao, a top artificial intelligence researcher who played a key role at OpenAI, has now joined Meta as the head of its Superintelligence team. His hiring signals another major move in the ongoing talent war among Big Tech companies racing toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Who is Shengjia Zhao? From OpenAI to Meta

Zhao was one of the core scientists behind ChatGPT, GPT-4, and other major models at OpenAI, including the lighter GPT-4.1 and o3. He also co-authored the original ChatGPT paper, helping lay the foundation for modern generative AI.

At OpenAI, Zhao wasn’t just another team member—he helped shape the future of AI reasoning. His work on the o1 model introduced the now widely used “chain-of-thought” prompting method, which enables AI models to think step-by-step.

He also led teams focused on synthetic data generation, a critical part of how OpenAI trained models like GPT-4 using vast, high-quality artificial datasets.

Zhao’s Academic Background

Zhao holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, one of the top AI research institutions globally. He completed his undergraduate degree at Tsinghua University, known as the MIT of China.

His New Role at Meta

Now, as the lead scientist for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, Zhao will be responsible for guiding the research direction of Meta’s most advanced AI projects.

He will work closely with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang. His focus will be to unify Meta’s foundational model efforts, including the Llama model series, and help push the company’s vision toward building AGI—and eventually, superintelligent systems.

What is Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)?

Launched in 2025, Meta Superintelligence Labs is Meta’s bold move to compete in the AGI space. It brings together all of Meta’s cutting-edge AI research—from Llama models to product AI features—under one umbrella. The goal? To reach superintelligence before rivals like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.

With Zhao now leading the charge, Meta seems more serious than ever about reaching the next frontier of AI.