AI Start-Up TML's Researchers Reject Meta’s $1 Billion Job Offer

Meta Platforms has offered compensation packages of over $1 billion to researchers at Mira Murati’s AI start‑up, Thinking Machines Lab (TML), to staff its newly formed Superintelligence Labs, Wired reported.

Despite reports of compensation packages ranging from $200 million to over $1 billion spread over multiple years, TML researchers have reportedly unanimously declined Zuckerberg’s offers.

As per the report, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth quietly reached out to more than a dozen engineers and scientists at the 50‑person start‑up, first via direct WhatsApp messages and then through rapid‑fire interviews.

Candidates spoke with Zuckerberg himself, followed by Bosworth and other senior Meta executives, before being presented with lucrative offers. One so‑called “sizable” proposal alone was pegged at over $1 billion across several years, with first‑year guarantees of up to $100 million, the report stated.

Leadership & Mission Over Money

The report suggests that the offers fell flat for two main reasons. First, many TML employees remain unconvinced by the leadership under Alexandr Wang, Meta’s new co‑head of Superintelligence Labs.

Wang, the former Scale AI cofounder, has been criticised for his relative inexperience leading fundamental research. Second, prospective recruits were uninspired by Meta’s immediate product roadmap, which centres on integrating advanced models into Facebook and Instagram features.

By contrast, start‑ups like TML and OpenAI propose grander ambitions, pursuing artificial general intelligence and groundbreaking research with more autonomy.

A spokesperson for Meta disputed the scale of the reported offers, characterising outreach to TML as limited to a “handful” of individuals. “While there was one sizable offer, the details are off,” Meta communications director Andy Stone told WIRED, questioning who propagated the narrative.

High‑Stakes Talent Wars

This latest setback follows Zuckerberg’s earlier success in wooing top talent from OpenAI, though he only secured recruits further down the hierarchy, as Sam Altman noted. Now, he’s learning that deep pockets alone may not suffice in the fiercely competitive, mission‑driven world of AI research. With TML freshly valued at $12 billion after its record seed round, its team can afford to stay the course without succumbing to Meta’s compensation bonanza.

Meta’s recruitment sprint underscores the high stakes in the race for frontier AI talent, and the limits of cash incentives when pitted against questions of leadership vision and research freedom.