Meta has recruited Matt Deitke, co-founder of Seattle-based AI startup Vercept, to join its newly formed Superintelligence Lab — the high-profile effort by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to develop powerful new forms of artificial intelligence.
Deitke, who worked at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and studied at the University of Washington before co-founding Vercept last year, brings deep expertise in embodied AI and 3D computer vision to Meta’s ambitious push to develop artificial general intelligence.
Reached by GeekWire on Monday evening, Deitke called the initiative “the most exciting bet I’ve seen in tech history.”
“Meta is hiring an absolutely incredible team, has the funding and resources, and has the distribution with users to make really incredible products,” Deitke said via email. “All the ingredients are there to make truly transformative progress in AI and I am excited to join.”
Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani confirmed Deitke’s departure for Meta in a post on X earlier Monday, noting that the “comp rumors are true,” about Meta’s Superintelligence team.
Meta is reportedly offering compensation packages worth up to $300 million over four years, including more than $100 million the first year, to attract top AI talent.
“Matt was one of the important team members in outlining our initial roadmap and he will be missed,” Ehsani wrote. She added that she and co-founders Ross Girshick and Luca Weih remain “fired up about Vercept and fully committed to building the future of the company!”
Ehsani noted that they “look forward to joining Matt on his private island next year.”
Contacted by GeekWire via email, Ehsani added, “Matt made meaningful contributions during his time at Vercept, and we’re excited to see what he does next. Great people move around. Great companies keep building. That’s what we’re focused on. We’ve never been more fired up.”
The hire underscores the tough reality facing AI startups as tech giants leverage their balance sheets for an edge in the AI race. With compensation packages that can dwarf entire seed rounds, companies like Meta can effectively cherry-pick top talent from promising startups.
“For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” Zuckerberg posted on Threads.
He also highlighted the company’s infrastructure investment plans. “We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this.”
Zuckerberg personally recruited Deitke. “Zuck reached out and we chatted and I talked to a few people on the team, and shortly after received an offer,” Deitke said, declining to provide additional details.
Deitke joins a growing roster of high-profile AI researchers that Zuckerberg has recruited for Meta’s Superintelligence Lab. Among them: OpenAI scientist Lucas Beyer, one of the creators of the vision transformer; and Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s AI model development.
Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO, joined Meta as the company’s chief AI officer after a $14.3 billion investment by the tech giant in the artificial intelligence startup.
Meta also hired investor Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO; and Daniel Gross, CEO of Safe Superintelligence, the startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
Vercept has raised a $16 million seed round led by Fifty Years, with participation from the AI2 Incubator, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.
Vercept is developing an AI-powered Mac app, dubbed Vy, that can understand computer screens and execute tasks based on natural language commands.
The startup’s co-founders also include former Ai2 CEO Oren Etzioni.
Deitke updated his LinkedIn profile to indicate that he is now an “AI Researcher @ Meta Superintelligence Lab.” Noting that he loved his time in Seattle, he said via email that he has relocated to Menlo Park to join the small Superintelligence Lab team. His first day was Monday.
Despite leaving the startup he co-founded, Deitke remains optimistic about Vercept’s future.
“I’m very excited and bullish on Vercept! I love the team and it made it incredibly hard to leave,” he wrote. “Computer use as a direction I believe is very exciting, and the progress being made there has been really great and I know they will continue to do absolutely amazing things.”
Updated Tuesday, July 15, with comments from Matt Deitke.
