Meta names former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao as Chief scientist for superintelligence lab
has appointed
Shengjia Zhao
, a former
OpenAI
researcher and co-author of the original
ChatGPT
paper, as the Chief Scientist of its new Superintelligence AI group, the company confirmed Friday (July 25).
Zhao, who joined Meta in June, was a key contributor to OpenAI's early breakthroughs, including the development of ChatGPT and the company's first reasoning model, known as o1. The model helped set off a new wave of 'chain-of-thought' AI systems adopted by companies such as
and DeepSeek.
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Meta
CEO
Mark Zuckerberg
announced Zhao's formal appointment in a post on Threads, calling him 'our lead scientist from day one.' Zuckerberg added: 'Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.'
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Zhao will report to Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, who joined Meta in June as Chief AI Officer. Wang is leading Meta's efforts in building
artificial general intelligence
(AGI), AI that can think and reason at or beyond human capability.
Aggressive AI push
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The move comes amid Meta's aggressive recruitment campaign in the AI sector. Over the past two months, the company has hired more than a dozen researchers from OpenAI, Apple, Google, and Anthropic. That includes two top Apple AI scientists, Tom Gunter and Mark Lee, according to Bloomberg.
Meta launched the Superintelligence Lab in June 2025 as part of its renewed focus on developing advanced AI models. The lab is separate from Meta's long-standing AI research group FAIR, which will continue to be led by Yann LeCun, who now reports to Wang.
Talent and tensions
Meta's recent hires have drawn attention for the size of the compensation packages involved. Some reports suggested offers exceeding $100 million, although the company has denied rumors of higher figures, including claims of $300 million deals.
Meta's current open-source model, LLaMA 4, has not yet matched the capabilities of OpenAI's GPT-4 or Google's Gemini models. The company is expected to release a more advanced model, internally codenamed 'Behemoth,' later this year.
Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the lab's future, saying, 'Together we are building an elite, talent-dense team that has the resources and long-term focus to push the frontiers of superintelligence research.'
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Mint
16 minutes ago
- Mint
The high-schoolers who just beat the world's smartest AI models
The smartest AI models ever made just went to the most prestigious competition for young mathematicians and managed to achieve the kind of breakthrough that once seemed miraculous. They still got beat by the world's brightest teenagers. Every year, a few hundred elite high-school students from all over the planet gather at the International Mathematical Olympiad. This year, those brilliant minds were joined by Google DeepMind and other companies in the business of artificial intelligence. They had all come for one of the ultimate tests of reasoning, logic and creativity. The famously grueling IMO exam is held over two days and gives students three increasingly difficult problems a day and more than four hours to solve them. The questions span algebra, geometry, number theory and combinatorics—and you can forget about answering them if you're not a math whiz. You'll give your brain a workout just trying to understand them. Because those problems are both complex and unconventional, the annual math test has become a useful benchmark for measuring AI progress from one year to the next. In this age of rapid development, the leading research labs dreamed of a day their systems would be powerful enough to meet the standard for an IMO gold medal, which became the AI equivalent of a four-minute mile. But nobody knew when they would reach that milestone or if they ever would—until now. This year's International Mathematical Olympiad attracted high-school students from all over the world. The unthinkable occurred earlier this month when an AI model from Google DeepMind earned a gold-medal score at IMO by perfectly solving five of the six problems. In another dramatic twist, OpenAI also claimed gold despite not participating in the official event. The companies described their feats as giant leaps toward the future—even if they're not quite there yet. In fact, the most remarkable part of this memorable event is that 26 students got higher scores on the IMO exam than the AI systems. Among them were four stars of the U.S. team, including Qiao (Tiger) Zhang, a two-time gold medalist from California, and Alexander Wang, who brought his third straight gold back to New Jersey. That makes him one of the most decorated young mathematicians of all time—and he's a high-school senior who can go for another gold at IMO next year. But in a year, he might be dealing with a different equation altogether. 'I think it's really likely that AI is going to be able to get a perfect score next year," Wang said. 'That would be insane progress," Zhang said. 'I'm 50-50 on it." So given those odds, will this be remembered as the last IMO when humans outperformed AI? 'It might well be," said Thang Luong, the leader of Google DeepMind's team. Until very recently, what happened in Australia would have sounded about as likely as koalas doing calculus. But the inconceivable began to feel almost inevitable last year, when DeepMind's models built for math solved four problems and racked up 28 points for a silver medal, just one point short of gold. This year, the IMO officially invited a select group of tech companies to their own competition, giving them the same problems as the students and having coordinators grade their solutions with the same rubric. They were eager for the challenge. AI models are trained on unfathomable amounts of information—so if anything has been done before, the chances are they can figure out how to do it again. But they can struggle with problems they have never seen before. As it happens, the IMO process is specifically designed to come up with those original and unconventional problems. In addition to being novel, the problems also have to be interesting and beautiful, said IMO president Gregor Dolinar. If a problem under consideration is similar to 'any other problem published anywhere in the world," he said, it gets tossed. By the time students take the exam, the list of a few hundred suggested problems has been whittled down to six. Meanwhile, the DeepMind team kept improving the AI system it would bring to IMO, an unreleased version of Google's advanced reasoning model Gemini Deep Think, and it was still making tweaks in the days leading up to the competition. The effort was led by Thang Luong, a senior staff research scientist who narrowly missed getting to IMO in high school with Vietnam's team. He finally made it to IMO last year—with Google. Before he returned this year, DeepMind executives asked about the possibility of gold. He told them to expect bronze or silver again. He adjusted his expectations when DeepMind's model nailed all three problems on the first day. The simplicity, elegance and sheer readability of those solutions astonished mathematicians. The next day, as soon as Luong and his colleagues realized their AI creation had crushed two more proofs, they also realized that would be enough for gold. They celebrated their monumental accomplishment by doing one thing the other medalists couldn't: They cracked open a bottle of whiskey. Key members of Google DeepMind's gold-medal-winning team, including Thang Luong, second from left. To keep the focus on students, the companies at IMO agreed not to release their results until later this month. But as soon as the Olympiad's closing ceremony ended, one company declared that its AI model had struck gold—and it wasn't DeepMind. It was OpenAI. The company wasn't a part of the IMO event, but OpenAI gave its latest experimental reasoning model all six problems and enlisted former medalists to grade the proofs. Like DeepMind's, OpenAI's system flawlessly solved five and scored 35 out of 42 points to meet the gold standard. After the OpenAI victory lap on social media, the embargo was lifted and DeepMind told the world about its own triumph—and that its performance was certified by the IMO. Not long ago, it was hard to imagine AI rivals dueling for glory like this. In 2021, a Ph.D. student named Alexander Wei was part of a study that asked him to predict the state of AI math by July 2025—that is, right now. When he looked at the other forecasts, he thought they were much too optimistic. As it turned out, they weren't nearly optimistic enough. Now he's living proof of just how wrong he was: Wei is the research scientist who led the IMO project for OpenAI. The only thing more impressive than what the AI systems did was how they did it. Google called its result a major advance, though not because DeepMind won gold instead of silver. Last year, the model needed the problems to be translated into a computer programming language for math proofs. This year, it operated entirely in 'natural language" without any human intervention. DeepMind also crushed the exam within the IMO time limit of 4 ½ hours after taking several days of computation just a year ago. You might find all of this completely terrifying—and think of AI as competition. The humans behind the models see them as complementary. 'This could perhaps be a new calculator," Luong said, 'that powers the next generation of mathematicians." Speaking of that next generation, the IMO gold medalists have already been overshadowed by AI. So let's put them back in the spotlight. Team USA at the International Mathematical Olympiad, including Alexander Wang, fourth from right, and Tiger Zhang, with the stuffed red panda on his head. Qiao Zhang is a 17-year-old student in Los Angeles on his way to MIT to study math and computer science. As a young boy, his family moved to the U.S. from China and his parents gave him a choice of two American names. He picked Tiger over Elephant. His career in competitive math began in second grade, when he entered a contest called the Math Kangaroo. It ended this month at the math Olympics next to a hotel in Australia with actual kangaroos. When he sat down at his desk with a pen and lots of scratch paper, Zhang spent the longest amount of time during the exam on Problem 6. It was a problem in the notoriously tricky field of combinatorics, the branch of mathematics that deals with counting, arranging and combining discrete objects, and it was easily the hardest on this year's test. The solution required the ingenuity, creativity and intuition that humans can muster but machines cannot—at least not yet. 'I would actually be a bit scared if the AI models could do stuff on Problem 6," he said. Problem 6 did stump DeepMind and OpenAI's models, but it wasn't just problematic for AI. Of the 630 student contestants, 569 also received zero points. Only six received the full credit of seven points. Zhang was proud of his partial solution that earned four points—which was four more than almost everyone else. At this year's IMO, 72 contestants went home with gold. But for some, a medal wasn't their only prize. Zhang was among those who left with another keepsake: victory over the AI models. (As if it weren't enough that he can bend numbers to his will, he also has a way with words and wrote this about his IMO experience.) In the end, the six members of the U.S. team piled up five golds and one silver, finishing second overall behind the Chinese after knocking them off the top spot last year. There was once a time when such precocious math students grew up to become professors. (Or presidents—the recently elected president of Romania was a two-time IMO gold medalist with perfect scores.) While many still choose academia, others get recruited by algorithmic trading firms and hedge funds, where their quantitative brains have never been so highly valued. This year, the U.S. team was supported by Jane Street while XTX Markets sponsored the whole event. After all, they will soon be competing with each other—and with the richest tech companies—for their intellectual talents. By then, AI might be destroying mere humans at math. But not if you ask Junehyuk Jung. A former IMO gold medalist himself, Jung is now an associate professor at Brown University and visiting researcher at DeepMind who worked on its gold-medal model. He doesn't believe this was humanity's last stand, though. He thinks problems like Problem 6 will flummox AI for at least another decade. And he walked away from perhaps the most significant math contest in history feeling bullish on all kinds of intelligence. 'There are things AI will do very well," he said. 'There are still going to be things that humans can do better." Write to Ben Cohen at
Mint
2 hours ago
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Three years on, AI is prompting IT services companies to cut workforce.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will lay off approximately 12,000 employees this fiscal year, as India's biggest private employer adjusts to slowing growth and rising artificial intelligence (AI). The company attributed the decision, which will primarily impact senior and middle-level employees, partly to AI. "TCS is on a journey to become a future-ready organization," a company statement said on Sunday. "This includes strategic initiatives on multiple fronts including investing in new-tech areas, entering new markets, deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves, deepening our partnerships, creating next-gen infrastructure and realigning our workforce model. 'As part of this journey, we will also be releasing associates from the organization whose deployment may not be feasible. This will impact about 2% of our global workforce, primarily in the middle and the senior grades, over the course of the year." This would imply that TCS, which ended the June quarter with 613,069 employees, will let go of 12,200 employees. Mint has learnt that TCS has already asked 100 employees in Bengaluru to go over the last fortnight. The TCS job cut comes 30 months after the debut of ChatGPT cast a shadow over the business model of India's IT giants, who employ armies of coders. Just two weeks ago, India's third-largest IT services HCL Technologies Ltd mentioned potential layoffs as automation replaces work done by graduates. 'The impact of AI is eating into the people-heavy services model and forcing the large service providers such as TCS to rebalance their workforces to maintain their profit margins and stay price competitive in a cut-throat market where clients are demanding 20-30% price reductions on deals," said Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research. 'This trend will last for about a year as the leading providers focus on training junior talent to work with AI solutions, and are forced to move on people who will struggle to align with the new AI model we call services-as-software," said Fersht. Meanwhile, fourth-largest Wipro Ltd is planning English competency tests for senior executives. Employees faring poorly in the first-of-its-kind exercise may be put on performance improvement plans, according to three executives privy to the development, stoking fears of potential layoffs. 'Please note that it is mandatory to take the communication assessment and clear it," read an internal email shared with Wipro employees on 19 July and accessed by Mint. 'Not taking the assessment will invite disciplinary action. Not clearing it in one attempt will result in a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)," read Wipro's email. A PIP is often seen as a prelude to termination. An email sent to Wipro seeking a comment went unanswered. At HCL Technologies, it is graduates who are in the crosshairs, unlike TCS and Wipro, where the heat is on middle and senior employees. "Of course, we have had a good amount of people released due to the productivity improvements. Now, not all of them are readily redeployable, because the requirements for some of the entry-level or lower-end skills are being addressed through automation and other elements," CEO C. Vijayakumar told analysts on 14 July. "The training and the redeployment time is longer. Some of them will be redeployed, but for others, it may not be possible. So, some amount of change in the industry is also kind of causing this," said Vijayakumar. HCL did not specify what percentage of workforce would be impacted. An email seeking comment went unanswered. The news of layoffs at TCS, first reported by Moneycontrol on Sunday, has also sparked debate about whether it is due to disruption from AI or the company's underperformance. "This round of layoffs is completely on account of slow growth," a TCS executive said on the condition of anonymity. 'Automation and GenAI cannot be displacing executives with 10 or more years of experience." TCS's under-performance under K. Krithivasan, who took over as CEO on 1 June, 2023, has caused anxiety among senior executives and a few analysts. In the June quarter, the company reported the slowest revenue growth among the top five, reporting a 0.59% sequential revenue decline to $7.42 billion. It's not a one-off either. Between 1 July 2023, and 30 June 2025, TCS achieved a 0.34% compounded quarterly dollar revenue growth, with its revenue increasing from $7.22 billion in the June quarter of 2023 to $7.42 billion in the June quarter of 2025. Infosys, in comparison, achieved a growth of 0.85% during this period, while HCL Technologies achieved 1.29%. For this reason, analysts at Kotak Institutional Equities believe TCS has lost its sheen compared to its peers in recent years. "TCS's relative resilience (ability to bounce back from a shock) versus peers has narrowed compared with the past. Relative competitive advantage has declined," its analysts Kawaljeet Saluja, Sathishkumar S., and Vamshi Krishna wrote on 11 April. 'TCS did not lead growth in the past two years, even when demand was driven by cost take-outs. Performance in developed markets in FY2025 has been poor with a decline in North America," the Kotak note added. Keith Bachman, analyst at BMO Capital Advisors, said AI-related productivity benefits could be meaningful in the 20-30% range over time. "Hence, all services providers will need to 1) gain share and/ or 2) enable and capture new addressable market opportunities to sustain growth. We remain concerned on impact to long-term growth from AI efficiency," wrote Bachman, who was among the first to cite GenAI's threat to IT services firms, on 23 July. Nearly a year after the launch of ChatGPT, Bachman had cautioned, 'First, all IT service providers have adopted new tools or end solutions that caused pressure on billable hours, to include Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and code repositories, amongst other areas. Further, each new tool or solution generates higher efficiency than the previous tools or solutions."
Indian Express
3 hours ago
- Indian Express
India-US trade deal: Commerce Ministry advised against accepting ‘unilaterally framed obligation' on digital taxes
Legal advisers to the Commerce and Industry Ministry have suggested that Indian negotiators dealing with their US counterparts should not accept Washington's proposal that prohibits India from reintroducing equalisation levy-style taxes, such as the 'Google tax', in the future, a person aware of the negotiations told The Indian Express. The advice was offered on the grounds that the provisions drafted by the US did not state that both parties should refrain from applying digital taxes on each other. Rather, they sought a legal commitment only from the Indian side and were seen as a 'unilaterally framed obligation', the source said. While the US offers a range of digital services in India and American tech companies have long lobbied against any taxes on such services, India also exports a wide range of digital services to the US — particularly in the IT sector — generating the majority share of its total services exports earnings from the US market. Another concern raised with the government was that agreeing to such unilateral provisions could set a risky precedent for future trade negotiations, where similar demands could be made by other trading partners during talks with New Delhi, thereby complicating future negotiations. In a move to assuage US concerns about India being a high-tariff nation, the Central government in March proposed abolishing the equalisation levy on online advertisements as part of the amendments to the Finance Bill, 2025. An equalisation levy is a measure to 'equalise' the tax treatment of resident and non-resident e-commerce companies. As part of the 35 amendments to the Finance Bill, 2025, the Centre proposed removing the 6 per cent equalisation levy (EL) it charges on digital ads, effective from 1 April 2025. A query emailed to the Commerce and Industry Ministry remained unanswered till press time. 'Digital taxation is typically discussed outside the framework of a trade agreement. It is a nation's sovereign right to decide on such matters, and India should reserve that right. Bringing it under the scope of a trade agreement weakens your position. We need to examine the digital trade chapters of the US and Australia, which India must study carefully. Australia has provided the US with a carve-out that allows for protections for US services. We also need to secure our IT/ITeS and technology exports from taxation in the US, our largest market' Arpita Mukherjee, professor at Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) said. Notably the US has forced Indonesia to several steep terms on digital trade. Indonesia has committed to address barriers impacting digital trade, services, and investment, a White House statement said. 'Indonesia will provide certainty regarding the ability to transfer personal data out of its territory to the United States. Indonesia has committed to eliminate existing HTS tariff lines on 'intangible products' and suspend related requirements on import declarations; to support a permanent moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions at the WTO immediately and without conditions; and to take effective actions to implement the Joint Initiative on Services Domestic Regulation, including submitting its revised Specific Commitments for certification by the World Trade Organization (WTO),' the White House statement read. The United States Trade Representative (USTR), in its report on non-tariff barriers, had earlier cited the 6 per cent equalisation levy as a discriminatory measure against US firms. The USTR report said that most digital services taxes are designed in ways that discriminate against US companies, often singling out American firms for taxation while excluding domestic companies engaged in similar lines of business. The US has also raised concerns about digital services taxes with a number of trade partners, particularly the EU. 'The disproportionate capture of US firms by the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) is also noted as undermining US competitiveness due to increased compliance costs not borne by EU competitors,' the USTR said. Differences between India and the US assume significance as New Delhi continues to face the risk of 26 per cent reciprocal tariffs. After Indian negotiators completed another round of discussions in Washington last week, a US team led by the US Trade Representative for South and Central Asia, Brendan Lynch, is expected to visit India in mid-August to continue negotiations for a trade agreement. While India and the US have agreed on a wide range of tariff lines, the negotiations — which currently only involve market access for goods — remain stuck over sensitive sectors such as agriculture and automobiles, which are key job creators in India. Ravi Dutta Mishra is a Principal Correspondent with The Indian Express, covering policy issues related to trade, commerce, and banking. He has over five years of experience and has previously worked with Mint, CNBC-TV18, and other news outlets. ... Read More
