Mark Zuckerberg’s push to poach AI experts from competing tech firm has hit snags, despite Meta’s readiness to shell out billions of dollars in salary offerings. As per reports, Meta’s hefty paycheck offers are meeting with rejections in the market. The company has actively been recruiting seasoned AI engineers to be part of its Superintelligence Labs unit, that plans to create AI systems that can perform tasks as well as humans or better.
In a fresh development, former OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati claimed that Meta has been reaching out to her employees at her AI startup, the Thinking Machines Lab, with staggering packages. Wired reported that one individual was presented with a billion dollar package — despite which, the approach was rejected.
Reacting to the development, Murati told the media that not one of her team members have accepted Meta’s jaw-dropping offers. Meta’s communications director Andy Stone did confirm that offers were made to Thinking Machines Lab employees — without giving exact salary ranges.
Over the last few weeks, Meta has repeatedly found itself under the spotlight for luring-in top AI talent into Superintelligence Labs with annual salary offerings casually starting at $200 million.
Apple, in particular, has lost several members of its AI-focussed Apple Foundation Models (AFM) team. This week, Meta announced the appointment of Shengjia Zhao as the chief scientist of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs unit. Zhao is best known for playing a key role in developing OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot, ChatGTP.
Zuckerberg has boldly confirmed that Meta is looking to invest billions into Meta’s AI efforts. Earlier in June, the company acquired a 49 percent stake in Scale AI and appointed its CEO Alexandr Wang as the chief AI officer at Superintelligence Labs.
As part of its AI roadmap, Meta is building multiple multi-gigawatt superclusters to support large-scale AI computations. The first of these superclusters, called Prometheus, is slated to start operations in 2026.