Shengjia Zhao Age, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Shengjia Zhao

• Shengjia Zhao was born and grew up in Beijing, China.

• From September 2012 to June 2016, Zhao obtained his Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing.

• In 2014, he completed a semester-long exchange in Computer Science at Rice University, Texas.

• From 2016 to 2022, he subsequently pursued a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University, mainly focusing on uncertainty quantification, Bayesian decision-making, and generative modelling.

• In October 2022, Zhao joined OpenAI as a researcher and a member of the Technical Staff.

• Over the years, he co-created ChatGPT, GPT-4, and smaller variants like GPT-4.1 and o3.

• He played a key role in developing OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1, which advanced chain-of-thought reasoning architectures and influenced subsequent deployments across multiple platforms.

• In October 2022, he received the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022 Outstanding Paper Award, a prestigious recognition in the machine learning research community.

• In June 2025, Zhao left OpenAI to join Meta as part of a significant recruitment initiative to strengthen its frontier AI team.

• In July 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Threads that Shengjia Zhao was appointed as the co-founding Chief Scientist of Meta’s newly established Superintelligence Labs (MSL). In this role, Zhao is responsible for setting the lab’s research agenda and scientific direction.
  

  Mark Zuckerberg’s post on Threads regarding Shengjia Zhao’s appointment as Meta’s Chief Scientist

• At Meta, he will work directly with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer, whom Mark Zuckerberg recently brought in from the startup Scale AI.

We are excited to announce that @shengjia_zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs!

Shengjia is a brilliant scientist who most recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research. He will lead our scientific direction for our team.

Let's go 🚀 pic.twitter.com/D93KQWIvFl

— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) July 25, 2025

• At Meta, Zhao will work on the development of Prometheus, a large cloud infrastructure cluster that is expected to deliver approximately 1 gigawatt of power by 2026 for training advanced AI models—part of Meta’s larger mission to progress toward artificial general intelligence.

• Shengjia Zhao has received several prestigious awards throughout his career. In 2015, he was honoured with the Google Excellence Scholarship. Four years later, in 2019, he received the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QinF) for his significant contributions to AI research during his time at Stanford. In the same year, Zhao was also named a JP Morgan PhD Fellow.

• He published a series of highly cited papers in prestigious venues, including Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeurIPS), International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), and Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). In his publications, he mainly focused on topics such as variational autoencoders and calibration techniques.

• He co-authored influential papers on deep generative modelling, posterior collapse in Variational Autoencoders, and uncertainty in distribution comparison, many of which are now part of graduate-level Machine Learning curricula.

• Zhao actively advocates for AI governance, interpretability, and alignment research at various prestigious universities. He has served on major ethics boards and periodically advises academic initiatives focused on AI safety.

• In various renowned publications like Bloomberg, The Verge, and Fortune, he was called one of the most influential minds in generative AI.

• Shenhjia Zhao is bilingual in English and Mandarin.

• Zhao keeps his personal life private.