Zhao was part of the team behind the original version of OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT. He will help lead Meta’s high-profile group, which is aiming to build new AI models that can perform tasks as well as or better than humans. Zhao will report to Alexandr Wang, the former chief executive officer of Scale AI who also joined Meta in June as Chief AI Officer. 

Meta has been spending aggressively to recruit AI experts to develop new models and keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google in the race for AI dominance. The company has been looking for a chief scientist for the group for months. Zhao is one of more than a dozen former OpenAI employees who have joined Meta’s AI unit in the past two months. 

“Shengjia co-founded the new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one,” Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wrote in a post announcing the news on Threads. “Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.”

Zhao was a co-author on the original ChatGPT research paper, and was also a key researcher on OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1, which has helped popularize a wave of similar so-called “chain-of-thought” systems from labs such as DeepSeek, Google, and others. He was listed as one of over 20 “foundational researchers” on the project.

Yann LeCun, another AI researcher who has been at Meta for over a decade and holds the title of chief scientist, will continue to work at the company as chief scientist of an internal AI research group known as FAIR, according to a person familiar with the matter. He will report to Wang, they added.