Meta has approached more than a dozen employees at Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines Lab with recruitment offers, including one worth more than $1 billion over multiple years. The aggressive recruiting campaign reflects CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s push to build his new Meta Superintelligence Labs by poaching talent from competitors, though none of the targeted researchers have accepted the offers yet.
The big picture: Meta is deploying unprecedented compensation packages to compete for AI talent, with most offers ranging between $200-500 million over four years and first-year guarantees of $50-100 million for some candidates.
How the recruitment works: Zuckerberg personally initiates contact through low-key WhatsApp messages, followed by rapid-fire interviews with himself and CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth.
- In recruiting messages, Zuckerberg emphasizes Meta’s vision: “We’re optimistic that everyone who uses our services will have a world-class AI assistant to help get things done, every creator will have an AI their community can engage with, every business will have an AI their customers can interact with to buy things and get support.”
- The process moves quickly from initial outreach to executive-level conversations about Meta’s AI strategy and product roadmap.
Meta’s strategy: Bosworth has been transparent about using open source models to undercut OpenAI by commoditizing AI technology, though internal pressure led to Llama 4 being “rushed out of the door” with performance struggles.
Why offers are being rejected: Sources cite concerns about leadership under Scale AI cofounder Alexandr Wang, who co-leads the lab with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and lack of enthusiasm for Meta’s product focus.
- Researchers view creating “AI slop for Reels and Facebook” as less compelling than OpenAI and Anthropic’s missions around artificial general intelligence.
- Thinking Machines Lab’s $12 billion valuation from the largest seed round in history means staying researchers don’t have to choose between mission and money.
What they’re saying: Meta disputes some details of the reporting, with communications director Andy Stone stating: “We made offers only to a handful of people at TML and while there was one sizable offer, the details are off.”
- One Meta source explained the competitive pressure: “The pressure has always been there since the start of this year, and I think we saw that culminate with Llama 4 being rushed out of the door.”
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously claimed Meta “didn’t get its top people” and “had to go quite far down their list” when recruiting from his company.
Industry skepticism: Sources across major AI labs expressed concerns about “big egos and a perceived lack of coherent strategy” at Meta Superintelligence Labs, with the organizational structure still undefined as everyone reports to Wang.
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