Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, is in the news after it was reported that, despite promising an employee $1 billion, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta company was unable to recruit staff from her organisation. According to a Wired story, Murati’s employees at Thinking Machines Lab have rejected enormous offers from Meta.
Meta’s $1B Offer to Murati’s Team Falls Flat
The US IT titan was trying to fill positions at Meta Superintelligence Labs, its new AI business. According to the article, Meta reached out to more than a dozen workers at Murati’s firm, which was only one year old. While others were given $200 to $500 million in compensation over time, one employee received a $1 billion offer. But no one took advantage of Meta’s alluring offer.
Zuckerberg’s Direct Outreach Signals Urgency
The story claims that Zuckerberg personally contacted a few of the Thinking Machines Lab staff members. Even though Thinking Machines Lab is a new firm and hasn’t released any products yet, this development showed how much Murati’s team believes in her.
At the moment, it is worth $12 billion. The former CTO of OpenAI has been in the tech sector for more than ten years. The 36-year-old engineer from Albania is well-known for heading up product development teams for programs like ChatGPT and DALL-E.
She is renowned for spearheading the design, development, and introduction of automotive goods like the Model X at Tesla Motors. She was formerly also connected to Ultraleap (formerly known as Leap Motion).
Mira Murati: From OpenAI CTO to AI Visionary
In November 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was overthrown in a spectacular coup, and Murati was appointed as the company’s acting CEO. She was one of the executives that expressed disapproval of Altman’s management style.
Remarkably, Altman was given back his position as CEO a few days later. She quit OpenAI in September 2024 to start her own business in the digital industry. In 2024, Time named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI. For “being a leading figure shaping the business world’s increasingly AI-centric future,” she was also named one of the Fortune 100 Most Powerful Women in Commerce for 2023.
Meta’s AI Ambitions: Shengjia Zhao Joins the Race
Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will be the chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs, according to a statement released by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on 25 July. The $14 billion investment in Scale AI is the centrepiece of Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar hiring spree in artificial intelligence in recent weeks.
Zuckerberg revealed a brand-new company in June dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs, which is composed of leading AI developers and researchers. Although the June message included Zhao’s name among other new staffers, Zuckerberg said that Zhao co-founded the lab and “has been our lead scientist from day one.”
Leave a Reply