> More than a dozen people at Mira Murati’s 50-person startup, Thinking Machines Lab, have been approached or received offers from the tech giant. (Murati, for those who don’t remember, was previously the chief technology officer at OpenAI.) One of those offers was more than $1 billion over a multi-year span, a source with knowledge of the negotiations tells WIRED. The rest were between $200 million and $500 million over a four-year span, multiple sources confirm. In the first year alone, some staffers were guaranteed to make between $50 million and $100 million, sources say (a spokesperson for the lab declined to comment).

> So far at Thinking Machines Lab, not a single person has taken the offer.

The whole thing is weird. Why is Meta offering so much money, and why aren’t the engineers taking it? Considering they’re not even working for OpenAI Anthropic or Ilya Susketever’s SSI, and they’d be still working on AI at Meta, what do they expect from Thinking Machines that is worth more than $100 million? Do they expect more in VC money (part of the $12billion seed)? Is Meta giving a formal offer that actually guarantees the large payout?

> Meta communications director Andy Stone disputed this reporting in a statement to WIRED. “We made offers only to a handful of people at TML and while there was one sizable offer, the details are off," he said. "At the end of the day, this all begs the question who is spinning this narrative and why.”

Or is the entire thing made up and Wired is too confident?

My guess is that Meta offers to buyout the key researcher/engineers by "matching" the TML share (latest 12B raise) with FB shares. Murati & co. probably asked for (and may still be negotiating) a "DeepMind" deal which allow the team to report to Meta CEO directly and some sweeteners for the investors who probably leaked the stories to gain leverage.