Thought Leadership
The battle for the best minds in the AI sector is reaching new dimensions: A developer from the start-up Thinking Machines is said to have turned down an offer of one billion dollars from Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg.
The battle for top talent in Silicon Valley is taking on ever more extreme proportions. As the magazine Wired reports, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has personally tried to poach top researchers from the AI start-up Thinking Machines with astronomical sums of money – so far without success.
Record offers remain unanswered
San Francisco-based Thinking Machines, which does not yet have a publicly available product, increased its valuation by two billion dollars last month to a total of twelve billion dollars. According to the report, several team members received offers of between 200 and 500 million dollars over a period of four years.
The top figure: one researcher is said to have been offered a package worth one billion dollars to switch to Meta’s AI division. Most offers included remuneration of between 50 and 100 million dollars in the first year.
Despite these unprecedented sums, no one has yet committed to Thinking Machines. The start-up was founded by 36-year-old Mira Murati. Murati played a key role as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024 and played a central role in the development of technologies such as ChatGPT and DALL-E . After short interim phases as OpenAI CEO and her departure in 2024, she founded the start-up Thinking Machines Lab in early 2025, which specializes in the next generation of multimodal and “generalist” AI models and has already secured high investment rounds
Meta denies figures
While a Meta spokesperson confirmed that “a handful” of offers were made to Thinking Machines employees, he disputed the numbers quoted: “We only made offers to a few people at Thinking Machines. While there was a sizable offer, the details are not accurate.”
Zuckerberg’s personal campaign
The recruitment drive is part of Zuckerberg’s ambitious plan to attract the world’s leading AI scientists and engineers to Meta. The Facebook founder is personally leading the recruitment campaign and is even expected to contact potential candidates directly via WhatsApp.
Meta has already recruited around 50 leading researchers and experts for its new “superintelligence” lab. Zuckerberg is said to have been dissatisfied with the progress made by his existing development teams and therefore founded the new unit.
OpenAI boss Sam Altman also recently confirmed that some of his employees had received offers of up to 100 million dollars from Meta.
AI strategy worth billions
Meta is investing tens of billions of dollars in the development of sophisticated AI tools that Zuckerberg believes could fundamentally change the global economy and society. The unprecedented sums illustrate how intense the race for AI talent between the tech giants has become. While traditional salaries in the industry already reach seven-figure sums, the current offers mark a new dimension in the battle for the future of artificial intelligence.
