Meta’s New Chief Scientist: Shengjia Zhao’s Vision for Superintelligence

Meta Appoints Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist of Superintelligence Lab

Meta Platforms has appointed Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT, as chief scientist of its Superintelligence Lab. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the appointment on Friday.

Key Highlights

• Shengjia Zhao’s Role: Zhao will set the research agenda for the new lab. He will determine the scientific direction. Zhao will work directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer.
• Background: Zhao is a former research scientist at OpenAI and co-created GPT-4 and several mini models.
• Lab’s Objective: The Superintelligence Lab aims to consolidate work on Meta’s Llama models and long-term artificial general intelligence ambitions.

Meta’s AI Push

• Aggressive Hiring: Meta has been hiring top researchers from rivals. These rivals include OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Apple, and Anthropic. Meta offers lucrative pay packages.
• Investment: Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI. The company acquired a 49% stake. It plans to spend “hundreds of billions of dollars” on computing infrastructure. The goal is to build superintelligence.

Future Plans

• Artificial General Intelligence: Meta aims to build “full general intelligence.” It intends to release its work as open source. This strategy has drawn both praise and concern within the AI community.
• Computing Infrastructure: By 2026, Meta’s Superintelligence Lab researchers will have access to Prometheus, a 1-gigawatt AI training cluster in Ohio