Meta has appointed Shengjia Zhao, a former OpenAI researcher instrumental in building ChatGPT and GPT-4, as Chief Scientist of its new AI research division, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement Friday on Threads.

Zhao, who also contributed to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, co-founded MSL and has led its scientific direction since the beginning, according to Zuckerberg. Alexandr Wang, formerly of Scale AI, oversees the lab’s overall operations.

The hire reflects Meta’s strategic push into reasoning models, an area where it trails OpenAI. Zhao is joined at MSL by several high-profile hires from OpenAI, including Trapit Bansal and a group of multimodality experts from the Zurich office.

MSL is expected to operate Meta’s forthcoming Prometheus training cluster — a 1-gigawatt system in Ohio coming online by 2026 — giving the lab the horsepower needed to develop next-gen AI systems.

Meta now has two prominent AI research leaders: Zhao at MSL and Yann LeCun at FAIR. How their roles will be coordinated going forward remains to be clarified.