Meta has named Shengjia Zhao, a leading figure in OpenAI’s AI developments, as Chief Scientist of its Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), according to a Threads post by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zhao co-founded MSL and had been guiding its scientific progress informally since its inception. Zhao will now work under the direction of Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO who leads MSL’s broader strategy. His formal appointment reflects Meta’s ambition to compete more aggressively with companies like OpenAI and Google in the AI space. The company has also added several notable AI experts from OpenAI, including Trapit Bansal and a team from the Zurich office that specializes in multimodal AI. This growing team will focus heavily on building reasoning models — a domain where OpenAI’s o1 model currently leads. A major boost to these efforts is expected from Meta’s Prometheus cluster, a 1-gigawatt computing infrastructure set to go live in 2026. Prometheus will provide the processing power necessary for training large-scale AI systems.
