- Mira Muratis' 50-person AI startup unanimously rejected Meta's recruitment offers
- Meta offered $200 million - $1 billion packages to Thinking Machines' Lab researchers
- Meta launched Meta Superintelligence Labs on June 30 to unify its AI research efforts
Every member of Mira Murati's 50-person AI startup unanimously rejected massive recruitment offers from Meta, the Thinking Machines Lab founder has revealed.
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta reportedly approached multiple researchers at Thinking Machines Lab (TML) with unprecedented compensation packages in an aggressive bid to poach top AI talent for their Superintelligence Labs. These offers ranged from $200 million to a staggering $1 billion over a multi-year period, with a mix of salary and stock options vested over four years.
Ms Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, confirmed that despite the huge sums involved, not a single member of her team accepted Meta's proposal. "So far at Thinking Machines Lab, not a single person has taken the offer," she said, as per Wired.
One researcher was offered $1 billion alone, while several others received proposals between $200 million and $500 million.
Meta's communication director, Andy Stone, disagrees with Ms Murati's statement. He said that the tech giant made offers to only a handful of people at Thinking Machines Lab, not the entire team. He admitted that even though Meta made "one sizeable offer", he claimed the rest of the figures being reported aren't accurate.
Mr Stone said, "The details are off. This all begs the question, who is spinning this narrative and why?"
Even though Ms Murati's startup hasn't released any product yet, it has raised funds at a $12 billion valuation. TML has already become very popular and closely followed in the AI world.
Earlier this month, Ms Murati announced that her startup has raised $2 billion in new funding and will launch its first product "in the next couple of months," according to CNBC.
"The company's first product will include an open source component for researchers and other startups," she added.
Meta officially launched Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) on June 30 to consolidate its AI research efforts under a single subsidiary, led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman. Meta has been aggressively recruiting researchers from top competitors, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Apple.
