Meta just offered ₹2,196 crore to a 24-year-old AI prodigy: Who is Matt Deitke?

At just 24, Matt Deitke has become the face of Silicon Valley’s intensifying AI talent race. The young researcher, who once walked away from a $125 million offer from Meta to focus on his AI startup, Vercept, has now reportedly accepted a staggering $250 million (₹2,196 crore) compensation package from the tech giant, thanks in part to a personal intervention by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Deitke is expected to join Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, an ambitious internal division tasked with developing next-generation AI models. The offer includes up to $100 million in the first year alone, highlighting just how far Meta is willing to go to secure the best minds in artificial intelligence.

So why has Silicon Valley placed such a premium on Deitke?

Considered one of the most promising young talents in AI, Deitke was previously a PhD candidate at the University of Washington before shifting to applied research at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) in Seattle. It was there that he led the development of Molmo, a cutting-edge multimodal chatbot capable of interpreting not just text but also images and audio, placing it at the forefront of modern AI research.

His work on Molmo earned him the prestigious Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022, one of the leading conferences in the field. Since then, his name has been on the radar of major tech firms. Meta had been attempting to hire him since late 2023 but faced initial resistance as Deitke focused on building autonomous AI agents through Vercept.

That changed when Zuckerberg took matters into his own hands, reportedly meeting Deitke in person to present a revised offer. The pitch worked. Deitke is now set to join an elite team at Meta that already includes Ruoming Pang, former head of Apple’s AI models team, who is said to have been offered more than $200 million to make the switch.

The recruitment is part of a larger strategy by Meta to build what it calls an “all-star” Superintelligence Lab, already backed by over $1 billion in funding, as it competes with rivals like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and xAI.

As the industry’s most powerful players compete to define the future of artificial intelligence, Matt Deitke’s career move may well mark a pivotal moment, not just for Meta, but for the direction the AI world is heading next.