Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly offered a 24-year-old kid a $250 million deal to join the company.
The latest move marks Meta’s strategy to acquire top talent and subsequently raises questions about economic inequality in an AI-dominated future.
Matt Deitke who had been pursuing a degree in computer science at the University of Washington, was approached for a four-year deal worth about $125 million.
According to the New York Times, he initially turned down Zuckerberg’s “low-ball” offer.
Meanwhile, the Facebook founder himself approached Deitke, met with him and doubled the offer to approximately $250 million. The deal was potentially structured to include $100 million in the first year.
The young researcher instantly accepted one of the biggest deals to date in the corporate sector.
Deitke has a pivotal expertise in AI and his passion can be depicted in his work.Having dropped out as a computer science student, he worked at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where he led the development of Molmo.
This is an open-source AI multimodal system, which is exactly the same type of system Meta has been perusing.
While in conversation with New YorkPost, he said, “When computer scientists are paid like professional athletes, we have reached the climax of the ‘Revenge of the Nerds.”
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.
In this connection, Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of Information studies and digital arts at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), shed light on the pivotal steps taken by Meta and substantial role of artificial intelligence as, saying, “These firms are awarding hundreds of millions of dollars to a handful of elite researchers while simultaneously laying off thousands of workers—many of whom, like content moderators, are not even classified as full employees.”
Zuckerberg has told investors, “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 gigawatts 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.”