This 24-YO AI researcher says “no” to Meta, then Mark Zuckerberg personally meets him with $250 Million offer

Matt Deitke, a 24-year-old artificial intelligence researcher, had reportedly refused to join Meta for $125 million. However, when he turned down the offer, Mark Zuckerberg personally met with Deitke and doubled the offer to around $250 million.

As reported by The New York Times, he would be paid up to $100 million of that in the first year.

Who is Matt Deitke?

Matt Deitke recently left his PhD program in computer science at the University of Washington.

The 24-year-old AI  researcher gained recognition in the research community after receiving an Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022.

After leaving academia, Deitke worked at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where he led the creation of Molmo, a chatbot designed to interpret not only text, but also images and audio.

In late 2023, Deitke co-founded Vercept, a startup focused on autonomous AI agents for executing tasks online. The company, though just 10 people strong, secured $16.5 million in funding from investors, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“When computer scientists are paid like professional athletes, we have reached the climax of the ‘Revenge of the Nerds!’” MIT economist David Autor told the New York Post.

Meta is reportedly spending more than $1 billion to build out its AI talent.

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Mark Zuckerberg's message

Zuckerberg’s company recently hired Ruoming Pang, who previously led Apple’s AI models team, in a package of more than $200 million. The tech giant has also committed to spending $72 billion on capital expenditures in 2025.

“We’re building an elite, talent-dense team. If you’re going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on compute and building out multiple gigawatt of clusters, then it really does make sense to compete super hard and do whatever it takes to get that, you know, 50 or 70 or whatever it is, top researchers to build your team. There’s just an absolute premium for the best and most talented people,” Zuckerberg clarified to the investors.

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