Thinking Machines Lab employees rebuff Meta's offer as high as $1 billion

Thinking Machines Lab employees rebuff Meta's offer as high as $1 billion

31 Jul 2025, 10:35 AM

One senior researcher was offered an eye popping over $1 billion package over several years.

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Meta made an attempt to lure a handful of senior researchers from a one-year-old startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, signalling the Mark Zuckerberg-led firm is still aggressively looking to beef up its superintelligence unit after recruiting AI talent from OpenAI and others in the past couple of months.

However, all the employees at Thinking Machines Lab have rejected the offer so far, the Wired reported.

One senior researcher was offered an eye popping over $1 billion package over several years while others were offered between $200 million and $500 million to be vested over a period of four years.

Meta's talent raid attempt at the AI startup comes after Thinking Machines Lab raised a whopping $2 billion in a seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz earlier this month. The startup was valued at $12 billion even as it is yet to reveal what it is working on.

Its founder Murati gained widespread recognition in 2023 when she temporarily assumed the CEO role at OpenAI following Sam Altman's brief removal by the company's board.

After departing OpenAI in September last year, she established Thinking Machines Lab in February, maintaining relative secrecy about the startup's specific objectives.

Meta has been on a hiring spree after first making a significant investment in data labeling company Scale AI last month. As part of the deal, he also brought in Scale AI's co-founder Alexandr Wang to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs as chief AI officer.

Wang wrote on X that he will be working alongside former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Wang also listed the names of other employees hired by Meta from rival companies OpenAI and DeepMind.

Later, Meta also roped in Safe Intelligence's co-founder and CEO Daniel Gross. This prompted Ilya Sutskever to formally step into the role of CEO at Safe Intelligence, which he had launched last year after leaving OpenAI.

Recently, Meta also brought on board two prominent artificial intelligence specialists from rival firm Apple --Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, per Bloomberg report.

Meta recently appointed Shengjia Zhao, one of the original developers behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, as the chief scientist for its superintelligence unit.

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