What is the price to reach the holy grail of Artificial Superintelligence? Mark Zuckerberg is determined to find out as he whips out the big checkbook to buy Meta back into the AI leaderboard.
In the past month, the Meta CEO has personally orchestrated a full-throttle pursuit of the best team money can buy, a clear signal that Meta is playing for the highest stakes in the AI arms race. For years, Meta held a strong position in the AI ecosystem, thanks to its formidable research team and timely pivot to open-source philosophy, making its Llama models available to all. This approach not only garnered goodwill but also fostered a vibrant developer community.
However, the rapid advancements from competitors, particularly with Chinese open-source models like DeepSeek, and the disappointing release of Llama 4, have caught Meta flat-footed. Researchers faced with rumored $100 million signing bonuses have taken to calling it "Zuck Bucks", which just a few years ago was a derisive term for Zuckerberg's secret funding of Democratic initiatives. Now Zuck Bucks is Meta's AI playbook.
As part of an aggressive talent acquisition strategy, Zuckerberg unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Ilya Sutskever and acquire his company, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), sources familiar with the matter said. Despite this, Meta is closing in on hiring SSI's co-founder and CEO, Daniel Gross, along with fellow tech veteran Nat Friedman from the venture fund NFDG. Separately, Meta also invested $14.3 billion in data-labeling startup Scale AI, bringing its CEO Alexandr Wang aboard to lead a new team.
Meta's self-described "Superintelligence" team, by its very name, aims for fundamental research breakthroughs, but a major hurdle is achieving internal alignment on what "winning" the race for Artificial Superintelligence truly means.
Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun is a known skeptic of the large language model path to ASI or Artificial Superintelligence. Artificial Superintelligence refers to an AI that would vastly surpass the intellect of the smartest humans, including problem-solving, creativity, and decision-making. When you're chasing everything from reasoning-based language models to multimodal AI, how Meta will maintain a consistent vision is a major challenge.
A few things are clear from Zuckerberg's move. AI labs are seeking out the star researcher, the magnetic core who will draw in the best of the best. We talked to one of them, Noam Brown at OpenAI, to learn more about how researchers choose between lucrative offers.
The other is that Zuckerberg is validating the current AI funding frenzy. They are not just offering lavish salaries, but have shown a willingness to buy highly valued, unprofitable, and even pre-product companies like SSI and Thinking Machines for the top talent, according to sources. This is not typical corporate M&A. This is a testament to the raw value placed on talent and nascent technology in a hyper-competitive environment. It signals that in the Artificial Superintelligence race, traditional metrics of profitability and product maturity are secondary to securing the brightest minds and foundational intellectual property.
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