Mark, Meta, Mira Murati & the billion-dollar AI job offer

Would you turn down a billion-dollar job offer, especially for doing something you’re brilliant at? I’m sure most of you wouldn’t even blink before saying, No, I wouldn’t.

But someone just did. Now, we don’t know who this person was. But we do know a few things, thanks to a WIRED report.

The Meta job offer

The offer came from none other than Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. The job was with Meta’s newly formed AI unit, called the Superintelligence Lab. And the intended target? A member of Mira Murati’s AI start-up, Thinking Machines Lab.

Who is Mira Murati?

Before we get into the job offer itself, here’s a quick refresher on Mira Murati, in case you don’t remember her.

The Albanian-American tech visionary was the Chief Techincal Officer at OpenAI, the company that achieved a major generative AI breakthrough with ChatGPT.

Murati is known for playing a pivotal role at the AI behemoth led by Sam Altman.

She has since moved on to her next AI venture, which raised around $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation in a funding round this June. That’s a record high for a pre-seed funding round. However, not much is known yet about the products she and her team are developing.

Zuckerberg, the AI head-hunter

Back to the Meta job offer. According to the WIRED report, Mark Zuckerberg—who has been aggressively recruiting top AI talent—has set his sights on Mira’s 50-member team.

One of the offers made to Thinking Machines Lab employees was worth over $1 billion, spread over several years. Other offers ranged between $200 million and $500 million over a four-year period.

WIRED adds that none of these offers has been accepted so far.

The fight for top-tier AI Intelligence

While Meta hasn’t yet succeeded in poaching talent from Mira Murati’s team, the sheer size of the offers shows just how fierce the competition in the AI landscape has become. It also underscores the escalating fight for top-tier AI talent.

So while this billion-dollar offer may seem shocking now, in the days to come, we may well see even more jaw-dropping deals in this space.