Meta paid $14 billion to land Alexandr Wang. It waved $100 million packages at OpenAI researchers. Mark Zuckerberg even showed up at people’s doors with soup. Nearly a year on, the man running Meta’s SuperIntelligence Lab wants to set the record straight on why his team actually said yes. Speaking on the “Core Memory” podcast, Wang called the money-first framing “an incorrect assumption.” He said it was one of the biggest gaps between how outsiders read his lab and what the day-to-day inside is actually like.His argument rests on a simple point. Most of the people Meta poached were already doing very well financially at OpenAI, Apple, DeepMind, and Anthropic. Staying put would have paid them handsomely. They left anyway. Wang says the paycheck isn’t what tipped the scale.
Why Meta’s AI hires actually said yes, according to Wang
The pitch, he said, was compute. Specifically, a lot of compute per researcher. Meta promised hires they could move faster on their own ideas than they could at their old labs, where GPU queues and internal politics often slowed work down. Recruits were reportedly told they’d get dedicated allocations as high as 30,000 chips.Beyond hardware, Wang pointed to two things: talent density and creative freedom. He described the lab as a small, “truly cracked group” where researchers could place bold bets without layers of approval. In a field where access to silicon often decides which papers get written, that combination is a real draw.Wang himself is the centerpiece of the operation. Meta paid roughly $14 billion last year for a 49% stake in Scale AI, the data-labelling firm he co-founded, and brought him in to run the new lab. The deal made the 28-year-old one of the most expensive hires in tech history.
The Meta vs OpenAI talent war that somehow involved soup
The hiring fights have cooled, but they left a mark on the industry. Through last summer, Meta reportedly offered $100 million sign-on packages, with some deals stretching toward $300 million over four years. The New York Times compared AI researchers to NBA free agents, complete with unofficial agents and group chats where offers got workshopped.Wang’s lab also pulled in former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, ex-Apple foundation models head Ruoming Pang, and former OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal. OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen at one point compared the raids to a burglary, telling staff it felt like “someone has broken into our home and stolen something.”Then there’s the soup story. Chen previously told Vance that Zuckerberg hand-delivered homemade soup to an unnamed OpenAI employee Meta was trying to recruit. Chen added that he, too, has “delivered soup to people we’ve been recruiting from Meta.”Wang’s take? He doubts the soup was actually homemade. But he said the gesture made the point Meta wanted it to make.”Part of the premise of building this lab was also that, like, we had to show everyone that we really, really cared about this technology and we cared about their specific research directions and what they were working on,” Wang said. “It was a very individualized recruiting process.”