Meta breaks records with $250m offer to 24-year-old AI prodigy

Matt Deitke originally turned down a lesser offer. Source: X.

The offer, which doubled after initial negotiations stalled, was reportedly closed after direct intervention from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a staggering amount, not just for its size, but for what it reveals about where value—and vulnerability—now lies in the AI arms race.

Deitke, who dropped out of a PhD programme at the University of Washington, had previously co-founded a startup called Vercept, focused on autonomous agents.

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He made his name at the Allen Institute for AI, where he led work on Molmo, a multimodal model that won accolades at NeurIPS 2022. His most recent product, Vy, which attempts to learn and automate a user's digital habits, received a mixed reception, with some users citing bugs and poor integration across key apps.

Still, Meta wasn’t deterred. Deitke’s recruitment forms part of a broader pattern: the company has reportedly spent over $1bn this year alone to attract elite researchers from Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic. Its capital expenditure for 2025 is projected to reach $72bn, marking a nearly $30bn increase from the previous year—underscoring how high the stakes have become in AI.