NEW YORK, July 25 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms ( META )

has appointed Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT, as chief

scientist of its Superintelligence Lab, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said

on Friday, as the company accelerates its push into advanced AI.

"In this role, Shengjia will set the research agenda and

scientific direction for our new lab working directly with me

and Alex," Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post, referring to

Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who Zuckerberg hired from

startup Scale AI when Meta took a big stake in it.

Zhao, a former research scientist at OpenAI, co-created

ChatGPT, GPT-4 and several of OpenAI's mini models, including

4.1 and o3.

He is among several researchers who have moved from OpenAI to

Meta in recent weeks, part of a broader talent arms race as

Zuckerberg aggressively hires from rivals to close the gap in

advanced AI. Meta has been offering some of Silicon Valley's

most lucrative pay packages and striking startup deals to

attract top researchers, a strategy that follows the

underwhelming performance of its Llama 4 model.

Meta launched the Superintelligence Lab recently to consolidate

work on its Llama models and long-term artificial general

intelligence ambitions. Zhao is a co-founder of the lab,

according to the Threads post, which operates separately from

FAIR, Meta's established AI research division led by deep

learning pioneer Yann LeCun.

Zuckerberg has said Meta aims to build "full general

intelligence" and release its work as open source - a strategy

that has drawn both praise and concern within the AI

community.