Meta drops $250M to hire 24-year-old AI prodigy

Mark Zuckerberg personally doubled Meta’s offer to secure Matt Deitke — a multimodal AI pioneer and startup founder — in one of tech’s biggest talent poaches.

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- Deitke co-created Molmo at AI2 and later co-founded Vercept, raising $16M for its autonomous desktop agent Vy

- Vy impressed in some apps but drew criticism for clunky performance in Chrome and Apple Numbers

- Meta has spent over $1B on elite AI hires and plans $72B in 2025 CapEx to fuel its Superintelligence Lab

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In the AI talent race, top researchers are now commanding athlete-level paychecks.