Meta has hired about 15-20 AI researchers from OpenAI and Google Gemini. Many are getting $100 million signing bonuses and $10+ million per year in salary.
There are terms to those agreements in terms of what has to be done by the new hires to keep the bonuses.
Meta paid $15 billion for 49% of Scale AI. This was an acquisition but 49% was used to avoid DOJ review. There are unrevealed terms that make this a complete acquisition.
Meta offered $32 billion for Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence company but the offer was rejected. It is believed that Ilya has some concept of how to get large language models to go to self tuning and iterative improvement.
Meta has $70 billion in cash and Meta was planning to spend $65-72 billion in 2025 on AI. Meta’s Llama 4 AI was a huge disappointment and Meta must spend to try to catch up.
Here's everyone Meta hired for their Superintelligence team.
Say hello to the new residents of Atherton with their $10M+/yr comp packages, everyone! pic.twitter.com/6MxPtHPOr3
— Deedy (@deedydas) June 30, 2025

Meta hired at least eight other OpenAI AI researchers.
AI NEWS: Meta just poached at least eight top OpenAI researchers to build out its new "superintelligence" team.
Plus, more news from OpenAI, Google, Tencent, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and xAI.
Here's everything you need to know:
— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) June 30, 2025

Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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AI fatigue. Certainly there are applications that are practical: self driving cars, tanks, drones etc. But at the same time there is a ton of bubbly stuff. Which is going to burst. Just like dot-coms did.
You will not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.
Unfortunately, it will become the lazy majority’s library tho… Billions of people taking cues from what will eventually amount to one or several central information agencies.
With regards to the SDCs, I’m assuming they fail safe when they go sensor blind? Like at some point, with enough grime and bird guano on a SDC Tesla, it should just go into error and park itself, right?
That sort of pay wouldn’t be unusual for star Athletes, Actors, Musicians. Makes sense Zuckerberg is trying it. Not obvious it can buy the performance he needs any more than that’s guaranteed for the Athletes, Actors or Musicians. Musk may be getting more value burning cash to keep building out the biggest best training clusters.