‘Zuck Reached Out And We Chatted’: Meta Lures Seattle AI Founder With $100M-Plus Offer To Join Its Superintelligence Dream Team
Matt Deitke, co-founder of Seattle-based AI startup Vercept, has joined Meta’s (NASDAQ:META) Superintelligence Lab after receiving a direct offer from CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Deitke described the initiative as “the most exciting bet I’ve seen in tech history,” signaling Meta’s bold ambitions in artificial general intelligence, GeekWire reports.
Deitke brings advanced expertise in embodied AI and 3D computer vision, having previously worked at the Allen Institute for AI and studied at the University of Washington before founding Vercept in 2024, according to GeekWire.
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Meta is offering compensation packages worth as much as $300 million over four years to attract elite AI talent for its Superintelligence Lab. According to GeekWire, the first-year payout can exceed $100 million, a figure larger than many startups raise in early rounds.
Zuckerberg has stated on Threads that Meta will invest “hundreds of billions of dollars into compute” to support its superintelligence vision. With compensation packages that can dwarf entire seed rounds, companies like Meta can effectively cherry-pick top talent from promising startups, GeekWire reports.
Deitke confirmed that Zuckerberg personally reached out and initiated the hiring conversation, which quickly led to an offer. “Zuck reached out and we chatted and I talked to a few people on the team, and shortly after received an offer,” he told GeekWire.
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Deitke’s first day at Meta was Monday, after relocating from Seattle to join the small Superintelligence Lab team, GeekWire reports. He has also updated his LinkedIn to reflect his new role as “AI Researcher @ Meta Superintelligence Lab.”
Vercept has raised $16 million in seed funding from major names including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, GeekWire says. The company is building Vy, an AI-powered Mac app that understands screens and performs tasks through natural language.
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Vy is Vercept’s flagship native Mac application designed to radically simplify how humans interact with computers. Instead of navigating menus or searching for help articles, Vercept says that users can give natural language commands as Vy understands what’s on their screen and takes action intelligently, directly within the software they already use.
Early benchmarks on the company website show Vy significantly outperforming competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic on UI understanding and screen navigation tasks.
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Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani confirmed Deitke’s departure in a post on X, referencing the “comp rumors” surrounding Meta’s offers to top engineers. She noted his early role in shaping Vercept’s roadmap and said the team remains “fired up” about the company’s future. Ehsani also joked about joining Deitke “on his private island next year,” a reference to the rumored compensation scale for Meta’s new AI team.
Despite leaving, Deitke expressed full confidence in Vercept’s continued success, calling the team “absolutely amazing” and telling GeekWire that the direction they are building remains “very exciting.”
Meta has already brought on top researchers, including OpenAI’s Lucas Beyer, Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) Ruoming Pang, former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross of Safe Superintelligence, Geekwire says.
With plenty of capital and the ability to attract top-tier researchers, Meta’s Superintelligence Lab continues to grow as one of the most closely watched AI initiatives in the industry.
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