In a stunning reversal that may define the future of artificial intelligence, Meta Platforms is abandoning its celebrated open-source philosophy and building a closed AI empire through the most aggressive talent acquisition campaign in tech history. With compensation packages exceeding $100 million and a new “Superintelligence Lab” funded by a $14.3 billion Scale AI investment, Mark Zuckerberg is betting that buying the world’s best AI minds can overcome his company’s technical shortcomings.
For years, Meta positioned itself as the democratizer of AI. Llama, its open-source language model, became the darling of developers worldwide — a deliberate counterpoint to the closed systems of OpenAI and Google. That philosophy is now dead.
“What we’re witnessing is Zuckerberg in full Founder Mode,” says a senior AI researcher familiar with the company’s strategy. “He’s realized that principles don’t win wars — talent does.”
The Superintelligence Lab: Meta’s Manhattan Project
Leadership
The new Superintelligence Lab is led by Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old CEO of Scale AI. Meta paid $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale AI — not just for the technology, but to install Wang as the general of its AI army.
The Recruits
Meta’s hiring spree reads like an AI Hall of Fame:
Ruoming Pang (Apple) – Former head of foundation models, reportedly offered “tens of millions per year”
Trapit Bansal (OpenAI) – Key contributor to o1 reasoning model
Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai (OpenAI) – Core research team
Jack Rae (DeepMind) – Leading researcher in large-scale models
Johan Schalkwyk (Sesame AI) – Voice AI specialist
Total confirmed poachings: 12+ senior researchers in the past month alone.
The Money Is Staggering
Compensation Breakdown
Base packages: $1 million to $300 million over 4 years
Perks: Dedicated GPU clusters for personal research
“You’re expected to give pretty much your whole self to Meta AI,” one engineer who declined an offer told us. “The money simply wasn’t good enough for that.”
The ROI Question
Meta reported $20 billion in profit last quarter. At current burn rates, they’re spending roughly $2 billion annually just on AI talent acquisition — before counting infrastructure costs.
Why Now? The Llama 4 Disaster
The trigger for this dramatic shift was the catastrophic failure of Llama 4 “Behemoth” in early 2025:
With $100 billion in annual cash flow, Meta could:
Buy 500 startups at $200M each
Return $50 per share in dividends
Fund 1,000 university AI labs for a decade
Instead, they’re building a closed AI fortress.
What Happens Next
Near Term (3-6 months)
Expect 20+ more senior hires from competitors
Llama 5 will likely be closed-source or limited release
Talent costs industry-wide will continue inflating
Medium Term (6-18 months)
First products from Superintelligence Lab
Regulatory scrutiny on talent hoarding
Potential backlash from open-source community
Long Term (2+ years)
Either Meta proves AGI is achievable and dominates
Or this becomes the most expensive failed bet in tech history
The Bottom Line
Meta’s transformation from open-source champion to walled garden represents more than strategic evolution — it’s an existential bet on the nature of AI itself.
If intelligence can be bottled and sold, Meta is building the factory. If it remains broadly distributed, they’re building the Metaverse 2.0.
As one departing Meta AI researcher put it: “We joined to democratize AI. Now we’re building a monarchy. The money is great, but the mission is dead.”
The question isn’t whether Meta can afford this strategy — with $100 billion in annual cash flow, they clearly can. The question is whether any amount of money can buy what they’re seeking: the future of intelligence itself.
In the end, Zuckerberg’s bet is simple: In the race to superintelligence, second place is last place.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
