Mark Zuckerberg names ex-OpenAI employee chief scientist of new Meta AI lab

Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has appointed Shengjia Zhao, a former co-creator of OpenAI's ChatGPT, as the chief scientist of the newly established Meta Superintelligence Labs. This announcement comes amidst Zuckerberg's ambitious initiative to bolster AI capabilities, which includes a staggering $14 billion investment in Scale AI. Zuckerberg unveiled the formation of Meta Superintelligence Labs in June, aiming to assemble a team of top-tier AI researchers and engineers. Although Zhao's name was included in the early communications, Zuckerberg clarified that Zhao not only co-founded the lab but has also been pivotal as the lead scientist since its inception. In his recent social media update, Zuckerberg praised Zhao's significant contributions to the field, highlighting his role in pioneering breakthroughs, including a novel scaling paradigm. He expressed enthusiasm about collaborating with Zhao to further develop his scientific vision. Zhao's impressive background includes co-developing ChatGPT and contributing to the creation of OpenAI's GPT-4 and its mini models. His expertise extends to leading synthetic data initiatives at OpenAI, as noted in Zuckerberg's earlier communications. Meta Superintelligence Labs is set to focus on foundational models, including the open-source Llama AI models, and various projects related to Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research. Zuckerberg also mentioned plans to invest "hundreds of billions of dollars" in AI computing infrastructure, suggesting that the coming years will be transformative for the company and the AI landscape.