Mark Zuckerberg Just Paid Some 24-Year-Old Kid $250 MILLION To Join Meta's AI Team After Being Told His Initial $125 Million Offer Was A "Low Ball"

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Source - Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta gave a 24-year-old artificial intelligence whiz a staggering $250 million compensation package, raising the bar in the recruiting wars for top talent — while also raising questions about economic inequality in an AI-dominated future.

Matt Deitke, who recently dropped out of a computer science doctoral program at the University of Washington, initially turned down Zuckerberg’s “low-ball” offer of approximately $125 million over four years, according to the New York Times.

But when the Facebook founder, a former whiz kid himself, met with Deitke and doubled the offer to roughly $250 million — with potentially $100 million paid in the first year alone — the young researcher accepted what may be one of the largest employment packages in corporate history, the Times reported.

I had to triple confirm that this was a real article before blogging it. $250 MILLION to a computer nerd? Are you fucking kidding me? How much knowledge does this guy possess? How far ahead of the rest of the world is this kid's brain that Zuck is willing to sneeze $250 million dollars ($100 in the first year) at him without thinking twice? It makes me legitimately nervous that one of the smartest guys on the planet is willing to spend that kind of money on a person. Think about the power he now holds. He has been identified as THE GUY who will be shaping the single most revolutionary technology man kind has even seen. And who is he? Well here's his face…

Yuck. I guess the $250 million can fix it. Regardless, here's a little bit more about him…

After leaving his doctoral program, he worked at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where he led the development of Molmo, an AI chatbot capable of processing images, sounds, and text — exactly the type of multimodal system Meta is pursuing.

In November, Deitke co-founded Vercept, a startup focused on AI agents that can autonomously perform tasks using internet-based software. With approximately 10 employees, Vercept raised $16.5 million from investors including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

His groundbreaking work on 3D datasets, embodied AI environments and multimodal models earned him widespread acclaim, including an Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. The award, one of the highest accolades in the AI research community, is handed out to around a dozen researchers out of more than 10,000 submissions. The deal to lock up Deitke underscores Meta’s aggressive push to compete in artificial intelligence. Meta has reportedly paid out more than $1 billion to build an all-star roster… 

Jesus Christ. I guess he initially got started in AI when he was fucking around with Photoshop in high school. Fast forward eight years and he's making more money than 99.9% of professional athletes…but it's not even about that. If you use ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok you know (or at least have an idea) how powerful this technology is. "Google searching" something has become the internet's dewey decimal system and that's not even scratching the surface of how advanced this stuff is and will become. You can ask it to do literally anything and it will. It's crazy. Only God (and Matt Deitke) knows where AI will be in a few years, but I guarantee the entire world will look different. With any luck we'll remain in control and the robots won't take over our lives. Thanks for reading. Have a lovely Saturday.