Meta has seriously entered the Superintelligence competition — the "next stage" beyond generative AI. Mark Zuckerberg officially announced former OpenAI core researcher Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), declaring "Zhao holds the rudder for the AI frontier era''s direction." This is a signal beyond a simple personnel announcement — it previews direct confrontation with OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic.
On July 26, 2025, Zuckerberg posted directly on Threads: "Dr. Shengjia Zhao has been appointed Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao will set the research agenda and scientific direction, working directly with me and Alex (Alexandr Wang)." Dr. Zhao was a core contributor to GPT-4, ChatGPT, and OpenAI''s first AI reasoning model ''o1'', and has recently been recognized for pioneering "scaling paradigm innovation."
MSL is Meta''s ambitious newly established organization exclusively for superintelligence research. CEO Alexander Wang (Scale AI founder) was recruited, but concerns existed about his lack of research experience — Zhao''s joining resolves this concern, decisively completing the technical-managerial leadership lineup. Meta has been aggressively recruiting researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind since June, transferring them from FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) and existing generative AI divisions to MSL — signaling "MSL will become the center of all AI capabilities within Meta." MSL has also built Prometheus, a 1GW AI training cluster in Ohio, as computational foundation for experimenting with and training ultra-large AI models. Zhao''s role focuses on developing short-term applicable "frontier models" (vs. Yann LeCun''s FAIR focusing on long-term research). The key point is recruiting Zhao to compensate for Meta''s weakness of "no Reasoning model." MSL''s organization, Zhao''s recruitment, and Prometheus construction from mid-2025 are changing that trajectory — Meta is now showing declarative moves not just to "catch up with AI" but to rewrite the rules of the AI Superintelligence era.
