Matt Deitke (born 2001) is an American artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. As of August 2025, he works at Meta Platforms’s Superintelligence Lab, after accepting a $250 million employment offer, following earlier public attention around declining a $125 million offer from the same company. He is also known for his work at the Allen Institute for AI and as the co-founder of the AI startup Vercept.
Early life and education Matt Deitke was born around 2001 in suburban Chicago, Illinois, United States. He developed an early interest in computer vision and AI technologies. Deitke enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of Washington, where he began research into embodied AI and machine learning, but ultimately dropped out to focus on industry research and entrepreneurship.
Career
Allen Institute for AI After leaving academia, Deitke joined the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), based in Seattle, Washington, where he contributed to multimodal reasoning systems and vision-language models. There he was involved in the development of an AI chatbot named Molmo, a project that uses images, sound, and text.
Vercept In November 2024, Deitke co-founded an AI startup called Vercept, which aimed to develop autonomous agents capable of performing open-ended tasks in real-world environments. Despite having only about ten employees at launch, the startup reportedly secured $16.5 million in venture capital funding.
Meta Superintelligence Lab In mid-2025, Deitke received a job offer from Meta Platforms to join their Superintelligence Lab, initially worth $125 million. He declined the initial offer. After a personal meeting with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the offer was revised and doubled to a reported $250 million across four years. Deitke accepted the updated offer and officially joined Meta as a lead researcher within its Superintelligence Lab at age 24.
Awards Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022.
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