Of late, Meta has been aggressively recruiting top AI talent for its Superintelligence Labs, offering substantial compensation packages to researchers. Despite making some high-profile hires from OpenAI, Mark Zuckerberg's billion-dollar efforts may have fallen short. His latest target is Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, but this time, his attempts to poach talent might have hit a snag.
A Wired report claims that no researchers from Thinking Machines Lab have accepted Meta's offers, despite the company offering big money to attract top AI talent. According to the report, one researcher was offered $1 billion over a multi-year span, while others were offered between $200 million and $500 million in stock and salary, vested over four years.
Despite these lucrative offers, Thinking Machines Lab researchers have declined to join Meta, possibly due to concerns about its leadership, particularly Alexandr Wang, who was recruited to lead the unit alongside Nat Friedman. Some Thinking Machines Lab employees expressed concerns about Wang's leadership style and limited experience. Others weren't impressed with Meta's product roadmap, feeling that the company's focus on creating AI content for Facebook and Instagram doesn't align with their own goals of achieving artificial general intelligence.
What is Thinking Machines Lab?
Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company led by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. Despite Thinking Machines Lab's $12 billion valuation in its seed round without a product launch, none of its employees have accepted Meta's lucrative job offers.
The company aims to develop multimodal AI systems that are customisable, widely understood, and capable of collaborating with humans across various domains like science and programming. The startup focuses on bridging gaps in AI understanding, emphasising human-AI collaboration, safety, and open-source contributions. The founding team includes ex-OpenAI researchers like John Schulman, Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, and others, with around 30 researchers and engineers hired from competitors like OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI.
