Inside Meta’s AI Talent War: Nine-Figure Salaries and Billion-Dollar Bets

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is assembling a dream team—Meta Superintelligence Labs—in a bid to emerge as a frontrunner in the AI arms race.

In one of the most aggressive pushes yet in Silicon Valley’s ongoing race for artificial intelligence dominance, Meta has launched a dedicated initiative to attract elite AI talent: Meta Superintelligence Labs. The company seeks to recruit top-tier researchers and executives, in some cases with nine-figure salary incentives. 

News of this development came earlier in the week when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the newly consolidated division, which merges the company’s long-standing AI research division (FAIR) with the team behind its open-source LLaMA models. Additionally, they are partnering with outside companies, such as Scale AI, which Meta recently acquired a significant stake in—a deal reportedly worth $14 billion. 

Scale AI represents just one in a flurry of new high-profile acquisitions and eye-popping compensation reports. 

As previously stated, Meta is said to be offering AI researchers and engineers total compensation packages ranging between $5 million and $25 million per year, with some exceptional offers reaching as high as $300 million over four years, according to Wired. While Meta has publicly disputed reports of $100 million lump-sum signing bonuses—an accusation made by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—insiders have confirmed that total equity-based packages for top-tier hires can indeed cross into nine-figure territory (although Meta structures these deals around restricted stock units (RSU’s), rather than immediate cash payouts).

Altman also claims Meta is attempting to poach OpenAI’s top workers: “[Meta has] started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team. You know, like, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in] compensation per year,” Altman said on an episode of the Uncapped podcast. “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.”

However, Meta has indeed hired at least eight senior AI researchers from OpenAI in the last few months. Among them are Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai—respected names in the field of computer vision and large-scale model training. Additional hires from OpenAI include researchers Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren.

Zuckerberg’s own Chief AI Officer is GitHub co-founder Nat Friedman. His team now includes Alexandr Wang—ScaleAI’s founder—and a host of contributors formerly with Apple, DeepMind, and others.

Meta's internal compensation records, obtained via H-1B visa filings compiled by Business Insider, show that even outside these blockbuster deals, salaries for AI roles have surged. Machine learning engineers now command base salaries of up to $440,000, with senior software roles reaching $480,000. That’s excluding—not including—bonuses, stock grants, and so forth.

It’s clear, given the eye-watering investments—now totaling nearly $80 billion—that Meta wants to be seen as the leader in the AI arms race. But will this extreme spending yield the kind of breakthroughs they’re hoping for? Some critics, like Gil Luria—Managing Director and Head of Technology Research at D.A. Davidson—have argued it’s “not sustainable.”

“Mark Zuckerberg thinks the most important thing in his business right now is to have one of the leading AI models… LLaMA 4, that came out this year, was an absolute failure—almost by his admission,” said Luria. “Meta can’t afford to fail.”

Luria also points out Meta’s unsuccessful, brazen attempt to acquire Safe Superintelligence (SSI), when co-founder Ilya Sutskever, much to Zuckerberg’s embarrassment, rejected a $32 billion offer. Undeterred, Zuckerberg poached SSI’s CEO, Daniel Gross, mere days later.

“We believe that AI will be the defining technology of our generation,” said Zuckerberg. “And we are committed to building it in the open, with the best people in the world.”

“Compared to that vision, the products they’ve rolled out so far feel somewhat trivial — chatbots with no clear path to monetization, cost saving measures like AI coding and customer service, and AI-enabled search that sometimes makes things up,” writes Clare Duffy for CNN Business. “Big Tech still has relatively little to show for all their billions spent in terms of significant revenue gains from AI or profitable new products, and investors are starting to get antsy.”