# Are you sitting down? A 24-year-old received a job offer this week with a grant of *$250 million!*

Machine translation from the original post. Not reviewed by a human translator. Historical claims may no longer be current.

Are you sitting down? A 24-year-old received a job offer this week with a grant of *$250 million!*

Matt Deitke, an AI researcher from Illinois, who at 24 has already changed the way robots understand the world, received a contract from Meta (Facebook) with an offer that is impossible to refuse. 

He started a degree in computer science, entered a PhD track at the University of Washington, and left it to dedicate himself to applied research. 

Along the way he worked on projects like a chatbot that understands text, image and voice together. He was the central force behind Objaverse - a huge repository of 3D models for machine learning. And ProcTHOR, a system that creates diverse environments for training robots. 
For the latter he also won an award at the NeurIPS conference out of thousands of papers.

Later he founded Vercept, a startup that develops independent AI agents that operate on the web. He managed to raise over $16 million, including from investors such as Eric Schmidt.

And then the offer came from Meta: a contract of $125 million over four years. Guess what he did? Well, he turned it down.

Then Zuckerberg himself came to a personal 1-on-1 meeting with him, and a few days later, Meta came back with a new offer: $250 million. Including $100 million already in the first year.  

For comparison, that is on the order of the pay of superstars in the NBA and NFL. No less.

But it doesn't end there.

Deitke is not only joining Meta, he is setting up the Meta Superintelligence Lab. The lab that is supposed to develop the next generation of artificial general intelligence. 

Zuckerberg defined the goal as "personal superintelligence" - systems smarter than humans, that can understand, learn, solve problems and act in the world independently.

All of this is happening these days.
Plenty of great talents are currently in similar labs, but it is rare to see a figure like Deitke, who has crossed the whole way from open foundational research to a position that shapes the direction of a corporation like Meta.

Once science led the world. Famous names like Einstein and Marie Curie, Nobel Prize winners. Then came the era of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg and Musk, and now, as artificial intelligence moves faster than the market, it seems the researchers are returning to hold the wheel.

Original: https://ofershap.github.io/posts/why-meta-offered-matt-deitke-250-million/
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ofershap_%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%9D-%D7%99%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%91%D7%9F-24-%D7%A7%D7%99%D7%91%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%A9%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A2-%D7%94%D7%A6%D7%A2%D7%AA-%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%95%D7%93%D7%94-%D7%A2%D7%9D-activity-7358940506787057664-5lPV
Published: 2025-08-06T22:22:19.321000+03:00