Meta Offers Up to $300 Million to Recruit Top AI Researchers

Mark Zuckerberg is aggressively building Meta's AI Superintelligence Lab by recruiting top talent from rivals like OpenAI with compensation packages reportedly reaching up to $300 million over four years, including over $100 million in the first year. These offers, which include immediate stock vesting and significant compute resources, are part of Zuckerberg's strategy to create AI systems surpassing human intelligence. Despite some skepticism about the reported package sizes, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth acknowledged that such lucrative offers are limited to a small number of senior leadership roles. Zuckerberg has personally led recruitment efforts, compiling a secret list of elite AI researchers and successfully hiring several former OpenAI staffers and other tech leaders to bolster Meta’s AI capabilities. This recruitment drive follows the lukewarm reception of Meta’s latest AI model, Llama 4, prompting Zuckerberg to double down on AI development to compete with products from OpenAI, Google, and others. Industry experts view Zuckerberg’s moves as a decisive push to advance AI reasoning agents capable of complex tasks, aiming to maintain Meta's leadership in the evolving AI landscape.