Gen Z 'AI prodigy' receives $250 million salary from Meta: The story behind the billion-dollar recruitment

Recently, Meta made the tech world stir when it did not hesitate to spend up to 250 million USD to invite a very young name: Matt Deitke, 24 years old, co-founder of Vercept - an AI startup that is rising in the world of artificial intelligence development. Interestingly, at first, Deitke refused the invitation from Meta, until. Mark Zuckerberg personally showed up.

 

When the AI "miracle" starts from a butterfly's wing

Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, Deitke was drawn to technology at an early age. In high school, he spent hours meticulously coloring photos in Photoshop—a repetitive task that he found more… exhausting than exciting.

That all changed when Deitke turned to AI. An automated photo colorization tool transformed a monochrome butterfly into a vibrant painting with bright orange wings.

'It was like I was witnessing a miracle – but it was a miracle of logic, not magic,' Deitke recalls.

From that moment on, he believed in the future of computer vision, and pursued it to the end.

Talent does not wait for age

During his freshman year at the University of Washington, Deitke enrolled in a graduate class on computer vision with big names like Richard Szeliski. Not only did he study hard, he sent pages of feedback, questions, and creative suggestions to the professors—so much so that he was asked to write an entire book chapter on deep learning.

During this time, Deitke was invited to work at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), becoming a full-time employee in his second year. He contributed greatly to the ProcTHOR project, creating virtual house models that help robots learn more effectively in 3D space – instead of having to simulate each detail by hand as before.

 

This project won the Best Paper award at NeurIPS 2022 – one of the most prestigious AI conferences in the world.

Deitke also leads the development of Molmo, a multimodal AI chatbot that processes text, audio, and images at the same time – a direction very close to Meta's current ambitions.

Vercept and the unexpected call from Mark Zuckerberg

In late 2024, Deitke and his colleagues founded Vercept, a startup that specializes in developing AI tasks that can automatically control software over the Internet. With only 10 employees, they raised $16.5 million from a series of large investors, including Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google).

Meta then took notice of Deitke and invited him to join their Superintelligence Lab, where they were developing technology that would surpass human intelligence. Deitke initially turned down the $125 million offer. But when Zuckerberg reached out and raised the offer to $250 million, he seriously reconsidered.

In the first year alone, Deitke could receive up to $100 million, with the remainder paid over the next three years. After many conversations and discussions, he decided to accept.

'This is the most exciting bet I've ever seen in the tech industry,' Deitke said of Meta's superintelligence project.

Even though he left Vercept, he still keeps in touch and affirms his belief in the future of the company he co-founded.

 

Bold Move from Meta

Meta seems to be playing a big game. In addition to Deitke, they also recruited Ruoming Pang - former head of the AI team at Apple with a package of about $200 million. Previously, CEO Mark Zuckerberg also spent up to $14.3 billion to buy 49% of Scale AI shares, at the same time attracting Alexandr Wang, one of the youngest billionaires in the world.

During a recent investor meeting, Zuckerberg frankly shared:

'If you're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building computing infrastructure, the most sensible thing to do is invest in the 50 to 70 best minds in the world.'

Meta is assembling top talent to compete in the AI era. And Matt Deitke – the Gen Z guy who was 'stunned' by the orange butterfly – is one of the most important cards on that chessboard.