Within days of joining Meta, Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, had threatened to quit and return to his former employer — a blow to Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar push to build “personal superintelligence”.

Zhao went so far as to sign employment paperwork to go back to OpenAI. Shortly after, according to four people familiar with the matter, he was given the title of Meta’s new ‘chief AI scientist’. 

The incident signifies that new organisational turbulence at Meta as Zuckerberg directs the most dramatic reorganisation of its senior leadership in the Big Tech group’s 20-year history

One of the few remaining Big Tech founder CEOs, Zuckerberg had relied on longtime acolytes such as chief product officer Chris Cox to head up his favoured departments and build out his upper ranks. 

But in the battle to dominate AI, the billionaire is shifting towards a new and recently-hired generation of executives including Zhao, former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub chief Nat Friedman.