Mark Zuckerberg is on a warpath to recruit top talent in the AI field for his newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs. After trying to gut OpenAI (and successfully poaching several top researchers), he appears to have set his sights on his next target.
More than a dozen people at Mira Murati’s 50-person startup, Thinking Machines Lab, have been approached or received offers from the tech giant. (Murati, for those who don’t remember, was previously the chief technology officer at OpenAI.) One of those offers was more than $1 billion over a multi-year span, a source with knowledge of the negotiations tells WIRED. The rest were between $200 million and $500 million over a four-year span, multiple sources confirm. In the first year alone, some staffers were guaranteed to make between $50 million and $100 million, sources say (a spokesperson for the lab declined to comment).
So far at Thinking Machines Lab, not a single person has taken the offer.
Meta communications director Andy Stone disputed this reporting in a statement to WIRED. “We made offers only to a handful of people at TML and while there was one sizable offer, the details are off,” he said. “At the end of the day, this all begs the question who is spinning this narrative and why.”
Zuckerberg’s initial outreach is low-key, according to messages viewed by WIRED. In some cases, he sent recruits a direct message on WhatsApp asking to talk. From there, the interviews move fast—a long call with the CEO himself, followed by conversations with chief technology officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth and other Meta executives.
Here’s a pre–Meta Superintelligence Labs recruiting message Zuckerberg sent to a potential recruit (the tone hasn’t changed much today):
“We’ve been following your work on advancing technology and the benefits of AI for everyone over the years. We’re making some important investments across research, products and our infrastructure in order to build the most valuable AI products and services for people. 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, and every developer will have a state-of-the-art open source model to build with. We want to bring the best people to Meta, and we would love to share more about what we are building.”
During these conversations, Boz has been upfront about his vision for how Meta will compete with OpenAI. While the tech giant has lagged behind its smaller competitor in building cutting-edge models, it is willing to use its open source strategy to undercut OpenAI, sources say. The idea is that Meta can commoditize the technology by releasing open source models that directly compete with the ChatGPT maker.
“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,” a source at Meta tells me. The rollout of Meta’s latest family of models was delayed due to struggles improving its performance, and once it was released, there was a lot of drama about the company appearing to game a benchmark to make other models appear better than they actually were.