Mark Zuckerberg gives a 24-year-old AI researcher who rejected Meta a salary of Rs 2,196 cr

Silicon Valley is dominating the AI talent battles, and Meta is obviously spending a lot of money to assemble the best tech talent for its Superintelligence Lab. According to reports, Meta is luring top personnel with generous salary packages. The most recent was a whopping Rs 2,196 crore paid directly to 24-year-old AI researcher Matt Deitke by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The New York Times claims that Deitke first turned down Meta’s offer of about $125 million (about Rs 1,098 crore) divided over four years in order to concentrate on his quickly expanding AI business, Vercept. Zuckerberg, however, personally set up a face-to-face meeting after he rejected the offer and changed it to an astounding $250 million (about Rs 2,196 crore), which included giving up to $100 million (about Rs 879 crore) in the first year alone. This final offer reportedly convinced Deitke to join Meta as an AI researcher within its Superintelligence Team.

However, what is Matt Deitke’s background and why did Zuckerberg feel the need to include him in Meta’s superintelligence project?

Deitke is regarded as one of the AI community’s most sought-after brains. He left academia to work on practical AI innovations at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) in Seattle after completing his doctoral studies at the University of Washington. There, he oversaw the creation of Molmo, a state-of-the-art multimodal chatbot that can analyze audio and visual input in addition to text. He received an Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022, one of the most prominent AI conferences, for his work on Molmo.

Meta had been interested in hiring Deitkework since late 2023 after his work in the AI field, but he first declined their generous offer in favor of developing his own independent AI agents at Vercept. But in the end, Deitke chose to join Meta’s ambitious Superintelligence Lab due to Zuckerberg’s personal participation and the higher remuneration package.

It is noteworthy that Meta’s Superintelligence lab has already spent more than $1 billion to assemble a “all-star” AI team, bringing in top talent from competitors such as Apple, Google, and OpenAI. Together with Deitke, Ruoming Pang, the former leader of Apple’s AI models division, is one of its most recent high-profile appointments. Pang was promised a salary package worth over $200 million.