Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a breakthrough by recruiting 24-year-old artificial intelligence (AI) genius Matt Deitke. The contract offered to Deitke is quite impressive, around $250 million. Previously, Meta Boss also recruited Alexandr Wang, a 27-year-old AI expert who founded the startup Scale AI
Deitke reportedly rejected Zuckerberg’s initial offer of around $125 million or Rp 2 trillion over four years in stock and cash. However, the Meta CEO decided to meet with Deitke in person and double the offer.
With a potential first-year salary of US$100 million, or around Rp 1.6 trillion, the young researcher received what could be one of the largest pay packages in Meta’s history.
“When computer scientists are paid like professional athletes, we’ve reached the climax of revenge on the nerds!” said Professor David Autor, an economist at MIT, as quoted by The New York Post.
Matt Deitke recently dropped out of the doctoral program in computer science at the University of Washington. After leaving the doctoral program, he worked at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, USA, where he led the development of Molmo.
Molmo is an artificial intelligence-based chatbot capable of processing images, voice, and text. The platform closely resembles the multimodal system currently being developed by Meta.
Deitke co-founded Vercept, a startup focused on AI agents that can autonomously perform tasks using internet-based software, in November 2024. With around 10 employees, Vercept raised US$16.5 million (Rp 270 billion) from investors, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
His innovative work on 3D datasets, embodied AI environments, and multimodal models has earned him widespread recognition, including the Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022, the highest honor in the AI research community.
The deal to lock Deitke into Meta underscores Meta’s aggressive push to compete in the artificial intelligence space.
Meta has reportedly paid over $1 billion to build a stellar roster of AI researchers, including luring Ruoming Pang, the former head of Apple’s AI capital team, to join its Superintelligence Labs team with a compensation package worth over $200 million.
However, Meta’s massive project has raised concerns about worsening economic inequality in the era of AI dominance.
Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of Information Studies and Design/Media Arts at UCLA and founder of the Digital Culture Lab, calls Meta’s AI development model a fundamental cause of widening inequality.
“These companies are giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a handful of elite researchers, while simultaneously laying off thousands of workers, many of whom, like content moderators, aren’t even classified as full-time employees,” Srinivasan said.
“These are the jobs that Meta and companies like it are trying to replace with the AI systems they are aggressively developing.”
Zuckerberg told his investors that he was building an elite and talented team. He argued that, with hundreds of billions of dollars spent on computing and building gigawatt-capacity clusters, it made sense to compete fiercely and do whatever it took to win.
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