Why Meta offered Matt Deitke $250 million
Originally posted on LinkedIn, August 6, 2025.
In August 2025, 24-year-old AI researcher Matt Deitke received a job offer from Meta worth $250 million, including $100 million in the first year.
Deitke, from Illinois, had already changed how robots understand the world. He started a computer science degree, entered a PhD program at the University of Washington, then left to focus on applied research.
He worked on projects including a chatbot that understands text, images, and audio together. He was also the driving force behind Objaverse, a massive collection of 3D models for machine learning, and ProcTHOR, a system that generates varied environments for training robots. ProcTHOR won an award at NeurIPS, selected from thousands of papers.
He later founded Vercept, a startup building autonomous AI agents that operate on the internet. The company raised more than $16 million from investors including Eric Schmidt.
Meta first offered Deitke a four-year contract worth $125 million. He turned it down. Mark Zuckerberg then met with him one-on-one, and a few days later Meta returned with a $250 million offer, including $100 million in the first year.
That is compensation on the scale of NBA and NFL superstars.
Deitke is not simply joining Meta. He is building the Meta Superintelligence Lab, which is meant to develop the next generation of artificial general intelligence. Zuckerberg described the goal as “personal superintelligence”: systems smarter than humans that can understand, learn, solve problems, and act independently in the world.
Many major AI researchers are now working in similar labs. What stands out to me about Deitke is the path he took, from open foundational research to a position shaping the direction of a company like Meta.
Science once produced global celebrities such as Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, both Nobel Prize winners. Then came the era of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. Now that AI is moving faster than the market, researchers seem to be taking the wheel again.
