ChatGPT Co-Creator Shengjia Zhao Joins Meta As Chief Scientist Of Superintelligence Lab
"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.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mint
27 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
- Mint
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."
Time of India
4 hours ago
- Time of India
India growing by leaps and bounds in space sector: PM Modi
NEW DELHI: Ahead of the National Space Day, PM Narendra Modi on Sunday highlighted India's growing capabilities in the space sector, citing Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla's recent journey to International Space Station (ISS) and the emergence of more than 200 startups in the sector. Talking about Shukla, who was one of the four crew members of the Axiom-4 mission to ISS, Modi, in his 124th 'Mann Ki Baat' episode, said that when the astronaut landed back on Earth, a "wave of happiness rippled through every heart" and the "whole country was filled with pride". He also highlighted that the success of Isro 's Chandrayaan-3 mission had created an atmosphere of curiosity in the country for space endeavours. "I remember, when Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed in Aug 2023, a new ambience was created in the country. A new curiosity also arose among children about science, about space. Little children now say, we will also go to space; we will also land on the Moon - we will become space scientists," the Prime Minister said. He specially mentioned the 'INSPIRE-MANAK Abhiyan', which promotes innovation among children by providing them with a platform to develop innovative ideas rooted in science. "Under this, five children are selected from each school. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like If you have a mouse, play this game for 1 minute Navy Quest Undo Each child comes up with a new idea. So far, lakhs of children have joined, and since Chandrayaan-3, their number has doubled". On India's space startups, Modi pointed out that their number has quadrupled in the last five years. "Five years ago, there were fewer than 50 startups. Today, there are more than 200." As regards the upcoming National Space Day on Aug 23, he said, "How will you celebrate it..., do you have any new ideas? Do send me a message on the NaMo App". He also mentioned the recent achievements of students in science and mathematics, giving a shout-out to the country's brightest minds.
