Meta Super Intelligence Labs chief scientist threatened to quit and rejoin OpenAI days after starting
Aug 28, 2025
Key Points
- Shengjia Jiao, co-creator of ChatGPT and head of Meta's Super Intelligence Labs, threatened to quit and rejoin OpenAI within days of starting, reportedly signing employment paperwork with the competitor.
- Multiple newly hired researchers have already departed MSL after brief tenures, signaling structural misalignment between Meta's pitch of unconstrained foundational research and pressure to contribute to product teams.
- Tension between CEO Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive timeline for achieving artificial superintelligence and researcher consensus on realistic progress suggests internal disagreement on MSL's core mission.
Summary
Shengjia Jiao, the co-creator of ChatGPT and head of Meta's newly formed Super Intelligence Labs, threatened to quit and return to OpenAI within days of starting the role. He reportedly signed employment paperwork with OpenAI to rejoin.
This signals serious friction at MSL, Meta's flagship AI research unit reporting directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Jiao leads the entire team and reports to Alexander Wang, the Scale AI CEO whom Zuckerberg recruited to oversee Meta's AI ambitions. The instability extends beyond Jiao. Other newly hired researchers have already left after brief tenures, including one who announced his departure on X after just a few months, saying the pitch was compelling but he felt pulled in a different direction.
Meta pushed back on the reporting as "manufactured tension without basis in fact" and characterized the coverage as "dramatic navel gazing." The company emphasized that MSL "has the greatest compute per researcher in the industry and that will only increase."
Structural misalignment likely explains Jiao's discontent. MSL was positioned as a foundational research team with unconstrained resources to pursue frontier AI work. Researchers arriving at Meta may have encountered expectations to contribute to product teams such as ads or Instagram companions rather than pure research. Wang reportedly struggled to align with Zuckerberg on timelines for reaching super intelligence—the term for AI surpassing human capabilities—suggesting tension between aggressive CEO goals and researcher consensus on what is realistically achievable.
The competitive intensity over AI talent showed again when xAI sued former employee Xu Shen Li for stealing trade secrets about Grok and moving to OpenAI. Li allegedly took materials in July after accepting an OpenAI role and selling $7 million in xAI stock. He later admitted to the theft during an August 14 meeting.