24-year-old AI genius Matt Deitke joins Meta after $250 million offer

Matt Deitke is only 24, but he’s already at the centre of Silicon Valley’s crazy race to hire top AI talent. Not long ago, he turned down a 10 billion offer from Meta so he could keep building his own startup. But now? He’s accepted a new, even bigger offer, worth $250 million, to finally join Meta.

And this wasn’t just a normal hiring process. Reports say Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, personally stepped in and met Matt to convince him. That’s how serious they were about bringing him on board.

Matt will be working at Meta’s Superintelligence Lab. This is Meta’s big new project to build the most advanced AI systems in the world. Just in the first year, Matt could earn around ₹878 crore. That shows how far tech giants are willing to go to get the best people in the game.

 

So, what makes Matt Deitke so special?

He was doing his PhD at the University of Washington before shifting to real-world AI research. At the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, he led a big project called Molmo, a smart chatbot that can understand not just text, but also images and sound. That work made a huge impact. In 2022, he won a top award at NeurIPS, which is one of the most respected AI conferences in the world.

Since then, every major tech company has been trying to get him. Meta had been reaching out since late 2023, but Matt was focused on his startup, Vercept, which builds AI agents that work on their own.

Things changed after Zuckerberg’s direct pitch. That meeting led to the giant offer, and this time, Matt said yes.

He’ll now be working with some of the best minds in AI, including Ruoming Pang, who used to lead Apple’s AI models team. Even Ruoming got a deal worth over 17 billion dollars to join Meta. Meta is not holding back.

The company wants to build an “all-star” AI team. They’ve already put over $1 billion into the Superintelligence Lab. And they’re racing to beat other giants like Google, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s xAI.

Matt’s decision to join Meta could be a big turning point. Not just for Meta, but for the future of AI as a whole.