Who is Matt Deitke? Meta offers $250 million to a 24-year-old AI prodigy
Meta just made one of the boldest moves yet in the fierce race for AI supremacy by offering a $250 million compensation package to a 24-year-old artificial intelligence researcher. Mark Zuckerberg's $250 million compensation to Matt Deitke highlights Meta's aggressive AI recruitment strategy,(X/Matt Deitke) ALSO READ| Meta offered up to $1 billion salary to poach talent from former OpenAI CTO: Report Who is Matt Deitke?Matt Deitke, who recently left his PhD program in computer science at the University of Washington, was initially offered about $125 million over four years to join Meta, according to The New York Times. However, when he turned it down, Mark Zuckerberg personally met with Deitke and doubled the offer to around $250 million. “When computer scientists are paid like professional athletes, we have reached the climax of the ‘Revenge of the Nerds!’” MIT economist David Autor told the New York Post. After leaving academia, Deitke worked at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where he led the creation of Molmo, a chatbot designed to interpret not just text, but also images and audio. Then in late 2023, Deitke co-founded Vercept, a startup focused on autonomous AI agents capable of navigating and executing tasks online. The company, though just 10 people strong, secured $16.5 million in funding from investors including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The 24-year-old also gained recognition in the research community after receiving an Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. Meta’s race to corner AI excellenceMeta’s push to recruit Deitke is part of a hiring spree, with the company reportedly spending more than $1 billion to build out its AI talent. It recently hired Ruoming Pang, who previously led Apple’s AI models team, in a package said to be worth more than $200 million. Meta has also committed to spending $72 billion on capital expenditures in 2025. ALSO READ| Meta wants candidates to use AI during job interviews. Yes, even during coding - Report “We’re building an elite, talent-dense team. If you’re going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on compute and building out multiple gigawatt of clusters, then it really does make sense to compete super hard and do whatever it takes to get that, you know, 50 or 70 or whatever it is, top researchers to build your team. There’s just an absolute premium for the best and most talented people,” Zuckerberg clarified the investors.
