CEO of the AI startup whose 24-year-old founder left to join Mark Zuckerberg at $250 million salary wrote on social media: We look ...

The race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy has reached a fever pitch in Silicon Valley, with tech giants vying for a limited pool of elite researchers. The amount of money being offered to hire AI geniuses is mind-boggling, as tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI fight over a tiny talent pool in their race to achieve the next breakthrough. And the cutthroat competition doesn’t look like it will ease anytime soon.Nobody in this rapidly escalating arms race is chasing the prized recruits quite like Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Meta CEO Zuckerberg is said to have tried to raid Silicon Valley’s top research labs, dangling $100 million pay packages with the hopes of poaching top researchers at these labs. Zuckerberg is reported to be hiring with the help of the List, a document with the names of the top minds in AI. He is said to be himself spending his days weeding through papers, searching for hotshot engineers and scientists to recruit for his Superintelligence team.One such hire is 24-year-old AI prodigy

Matt Deitke

, whose recent $250 million compensation package from Meta Platforms Inc has sent shockwaves through the industry, redefining the value of AI expertise. Deitke, a former doctoral student at the University of Washington, dropped out of his computer science PhD program to become one of the most sought-after minds in AI. Meta’s pursuit of Deitke began with a $125 million offer over four years, which the young researcher turned down. In an unprecedented move, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened, meeting Deitke face-to-face and doubling the offer to a staggering $250 million, with up to $100 million payable in the first year alone. The package includes a mix of salary, bonuses, and stock.

Vercept CEO on Matt Deitke joining Meta

In November 2024, Matt Deitke had founded Vercept along with several of his Allen Institute colleagues. The AI startup raised $16.5 million from investors such as the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt earlier this year. This was till came Deitke’s back-and-forth calls with Mark Zuckerberg. After Deitke accepted Meta's offer, Vercept co-founder Kiana Ehsani joked on social media, "We look forward to joining Matt on his private island next year."According to the company’s website, Vercept was founded with the goal of radically rethinking how people interact with technology, aiming to replace the maze of menus and code-heavy workflows with a seamless, intuitive interface that feels like an extension of the user's mind.

Mark Zuckerberg's AI 'hiring list'

Mark Zuckerberg is said to be in a group chat with two Meta executives called “Recruiting Party ” in which they discuss hundreds of potential candidates and tactics for approaching them—like whether they prefer to be contacted by email, text or WhatsApp. As a report in WSJ said that many on the List have three main qualifications: a Ph.D. in an A.I.-related field, experience at a top lab and contributions to A.I. research breakthroughs, one of the people said. "The recruits on “The List” typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco and Google DeepMind in London. They are usually in their 20s and 30s—and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power," reads the report.