Meta offered a colossal $250 million package to a 24-year-old AI researcher who turned down the tech giant’s previous offer. And he did not accept it easily. Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg met him personally and convinced him to take up the offer. So, who is this AI researcher? Well, his name is Matt Deitke.
Who is Matt Deitke?
Matt Deitke isn’t your average tech whiz. He dropped out of his PhD program in computer science at the University of Washington and quickly became one of the hottest names in AI. Initially, Meta pitched him a $125 million deal over four years, as reported by The New York Times. But Deitke said no!
That’s when things got really interesting. Mark Zuckerberg himself stepped in, met with Deitke face-to-face, and doubled the offer to $250 million. What’s more, he would be paid up to $100 million of that in the first year, the NYT reported.
He shared – ADD LinkedIn post
From research labs to startup stardom
After stepping away from academia, Deitke took on a lead role at Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI. There, he helped build Molmo, a chatbot that can interpret images and audio, along with understanding the text.
Deitke also earned serious respect in the AI world when one of his papers won an Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022, a top AI conference.
Meta’s aggressive courtship of Deitke is part of a much larger hiring spree. The company is said to be pouring over $1 billion into building a world-class AI team. That includes another major hire – Ruoming Pang, who used to head Apple’s AI models division. Meta reportedly lured him in with a package worth over $200 million.
Additionally, Meta plans to spend a whopping $72 billion on capital expenditures next year alone.
“We’re building an elite, talent-dense team,” Zuckerberg told investors. “If you’re going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on computers 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.”
