Matt Deitke, AI Genius with the World’s Highest Salary

Young researcher with fantastic salary hoisted meta

Matt Deitke may not be known as popular as Elon Musk or Sam Altman, but at the age of 24, he has listed himself as one of the highest-paid AI scientists in the world today. His expertise in AI technology development has made it the target of big companies like META.

Meta, a company owned by Mark Zuckerberg, offers fantastic funds to recruit Deitke. This amount reaches 250 million US dollars or around Rp. 4 trillion. This offer is not only in the form of salary, but also bonuses, stocks, and other incentives for contracts for four years. Interestingly, the figure is not the initial offer. Initially, META offered a compensation package of 125 million US dollars (around Rp. 2 trillion) to recruit Deitke. However, the offer was rejected.

Mark Zuckerberg then intervened directly. As a result, META’s offer doubled to 250 million US dollars, and Deitke finally joined. Of this amount, Deitke is said to be able to receive up to Rp 1.6 trillion in just the first year.

Who is Matt Deitke?

Matt Deitke is a young researcher who previously underwent a doctoral program at the University of Washington. He is widely known in the AI community because of his expertise in developing a multimodal AI system, which is a technology that is able to understand images, sounds, and texts simultaneously.

Before being recruited by Meta, Deitke worked at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and became the leader of the Molmo project, Chatbot AI which can process various types of data input. In addition, he also co-founded the Vercept startup, which focuses on making automatic AI agents. With around 10 employees, Vercept managed to collect 16.5 million US dollars (approximately Rp. 270.4 billion) from investors, including former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.

Deitke has received the “Outstanding Paper” award at the 2022 Neurips Conference, one of the most prestigious AI scientific forums in the world. The award was only given to a handful of researchers from tens of thousands who submitted works. The innovative work is in the field of 3D datasets, the AI environment is realized, and the multimodal model.

META’s ambition to build a super AI team

The meta step of recruiting Deitke is not a single decision. This is part of a great strategy to form an elite AI team to develop superintelligence, or AI that can think equally and even surpass humans. Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted that he did not hesitate to spend a lot of money to attract top scientists.

“If we want to invest hundreds of billions of dollars for servers and AI technology, it certainly makes sense to also recruit 50 to 70 top researchers in the world, whatever the price,” Zuckerberg told Investors.

Previously, META also hijacked Ruoming Pang, the former head of Apple’s AI team, with a contract value of more than 200 million US dollars (Rp 3.2 trillion). In total, META is said to have poured more than 1 billion US dollars (around Rp. 16.3 trillion) to form its Super AI team. This shows the strong commitment of META in building AI technology that is able to compete with other large companies.