Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly made a bold move earlier this year, offering a staggering $1 billion package to Mira Murati — former CTO of OpenAI — in an effort to bring her into Meta’s growing AI empire. Murati, however, turned down the offer, choosing instead to focus on her own venture, Thinking AI, a stealth-mode AI startup she’s been building since her departure from OpenAI.
The rejection, according to insiders familiar with the matter, did not sit well with Zuckerberg. What followed next was not another offer — but a calculated campaign.
What Meta is doing now?
According to people briefed on Meta’s internal hiring strategy, Zuckerberg has greenlit a “full-scale raid” — a tech industry term for aggressively recruiting top talent from a rival firm. Several engineers and researchers linked to Thinking AI have reportedly been approached by Meta’s recruitment team over the past few weeks.
The efforts are said to be part of Meta’s strategy to build its own frontier AI models that can rival GPT-5 or Claude 3.5, and Thinking AI is considered a promising hub of talent in that pursuit. The company, though still under wraps, is believed to be focused on building open and safety-aligned artificial general intelligence (AGI), a domain Zuckerberg has recently taken a deeper interest in.
While poaching talent is not unusual in Silicon Valley, the scale and timing of Meta’s campaign suggests a more personal edge. Murati’s refusal of Zuckerberg’s billion-dollar offer has been seen by some analysts as a public rejection of Meta’s AI vision — a narrative that may be driving the heightened response.
Industry observers also note that Meta’s latest AI releases — including its Llama 4 models — still trail behind rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. Bringing in Murati or her team would have been a major coup for Meta’s ambitions.
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