Meta Offered AI Researchers $100 Million to Switch Sides

Business Onion · 2:58

In 2025, Mark Zuckerberg started offering individual AI researchers pay packages worth close to $100 million to move to Meta — not for a team, for one person. It was the most aggressive talent raid Silicon Valley had ever seen, and it began because Meta had fallen behind. After Llama 4 underwhelmed, Zuckerberg didn't try to out-build OpenAI and Google — he tried to out-bid them. He built Meta Superintelligence Labs, recruited personally (a "Recruiting Party" group chat, dinners at his house), spent $14.3B to bring in Scale AI's 28-year-old founder Alexandr Wang to run it, and poached a string of OpenAI researchers — including a co-creator of ChatGPT. Sam Altman fired back: "missionaries will beat mercenaries." The real lesson: in frontier AI, the scarce asset isn't compute or data — it's the few dozen people who've actually built one. Against that, $100M can be a rounding error. But money buys a roster, not a team — and as of now, no one knows if the bet works. The Frontier Wars, Part 5. Follow for the series.