Mark Zuckerberg is On a war path to recruit the best talents in the field of AI for its new meta superintelligence laboratories. After trying Openai (and managed to poach several best researchers), he seems to have turned his next target.
More than a dozen people in the startup of 50 people from Mira Murati, Thinking Machines Lab, have been approached or received from the tech giant offers. (Murati, for those who do not remember it, was previously the director of technology in Openai.) One of these offers was more than a billion dollars over a multi -year period, a source with a knowledge of the so -called Wired negotiations. The others were between $ 200 and $ 500 million over a four -year period, confirm several sources. In the first year only, some staff were guaranteed between $ 50 and $ 100 million, according to sources (a laboratory spokesperson refused to comment).
So far, at Thinking Machines Lab, not a single person has taken the offer.
Meta Communications Director Andy Stone challenged this report in a statement to Wired. “We only made offers a handful of people in TML and although there is an important offer, the details are disabled,” he said. “In the end, all of this raises the question that turns this story and why.”
Zuckerberg’s initial awareness is discreet, according to messages viewed by Wired. In some cases, he sent recruits a direct message on WhatsApp asking to speak. From there, the interviews move quickly – a long call with the CEO himself, followed by conversations with the director of technology Andrew “Boz” Bosworth and other Mane Manager.
Here is a pre-meta recruitment message Superintelligence Labs sent by Zuckerberg to a potential recruit (the tone has not changed much today):
“We have followed your work on progression technology and the benefits of AI for all over the years. We make significant investments through research, products and our infrastructure to create the most precious AI products and services to help people. The developer will have an open source model at the cutting edge of technology.
During these conversations, Boz was frank on his vision of the way Meta will compete with Openai. Although the technology giant has lagged behind its smallest competitor in the construction of advanced models, it is ready to use its open source strategy for Saper Openai, according to sources. The idea is that the meta can merchant technology by publishing open source models that go directly to the Chatppt manufacturer.
“The pressure has always been there since the beginning of this year, and I think we have seen it peak with Llama 4 rushing out of the door,” said a source of Meta. The deployment of the latest family of Meta models was delayed due to the difficulties in improving its performance, and once its release, there was a lot of drama about the company which seemed to play a reference to make other models better than they really were.
