Shengjia Zhao's journey from a Tsinghua University exchange student at Rice to Meta's Superintelligence Lab Chief Scientist exemplifies the power of education. His foundation at Tsinghua, broadened perspective at Rice,

Zhao, previously a research scientist at OpenAI, played a pivotal role in creating GPT-4 and various lighter models such as version 4.1 and o3. He is among at least eight researchers who have recently transitioned from OpenAI to Meta.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will lead research efforts at the company’s new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao contributed to several of OpenAI’s largest breakthroughs, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the company’s first AI reasoning model, o1.