Meta Shells Out On Scale AI, Nine-Figure Comp Packages for AI Engineers To Catch Up In the ‘Race for Superintelligence’

If you thought that OpenAI paying $6.5B for Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive was steep, MetaMETA

is showing that desperation knows no financial bounds. Amid reports that the social giant ‘cheated’ AI benchmarks, the flight of its AI chief, and the departure of most of its key researchers, the company has spent nearly $15B to acquire… a guy you’ve likely never heard of before.

• After weeks of murmurs, Meta announced Thursday that it would buy a 49% stake in Scale AI — a data labeling organization that helps businesses ‘create high-quality datasets’ — for $14.3B.
• While the acquisition could help Meta in building competitive AI, analysts speculate the real selling point of the deal was CEO Alexandr Wang, who will now lead Meta’s AI labs.

Next stop, superintelligence: Wang, who will lead the “superintelligence lab,” will be equipped with the kind of cap space that would make NFL teams envious. In the run-up to Meta’s big buy, reports said that Zuckerberg was interviewing researchers himself, offering eight- and nine-figure packages in an effort to acquire talent and surpass competitors. The team plans to hire “about 50 people” in their bid to make an AI more powerful than the human brain.