Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the appointment on Threads on July 25th. Zhao will be responsible for setting the lab’s research direction and will collaborate directly with Zuckerberg and Meta’s Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang.
Zhao is an alumnus of Tsinghua University in China and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in the United States. After joining OpenAI in 2022, he was involved in the development of key AI technologies such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. According to Business Times reports, Meta has been actively recruiting researchers from OpenAI to strengthen its competitiveness in the artificial intelligence field. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously disclosed that Meta even offered signing bonuses as high as $100 million (MOP803 million) to attract top talent.
Meta’s new Superintelligence Lab is primarily tasked with integrating the development of the Llama model and advancing the long-term goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Zhao possesses extensive experience in areas like deep learning and reinforcement learning and is considered a pivotal figure with both strong academic theory and practical capabilities.
Zuckerberg emphasized that Zhao’s arrival will significantly contribute to Meta’s technological advancements in the era of superintelligence.
