Meta’s Secret AI Talent Grab: How a Runway Deal Became Silicon Valley’s Hottest Chess Move

Meta just played 4D chess in the AI wars—and the board was littered with signing bonuses.

The Talent Heist Nobody Saw Coming

While VCs were busy writing checks to AI startups, Zuckerberg's team quietly backdoored the competition. Their weapon? A runway deal structured to vacuum up top machine learning researchers before rivals could blink.

Why Engineers Are the New Oil

Forget Meta's metaverse pivot—this is where the real arms race is heating up. The company reportedly offered 'founder-level' equity packages to entire AI teams, effectively turning research labs into talent acquisition targets. Wall Street analysts are too busy calculating metaverse losses to notice the real power play.

One hedge fund manager quipped: 'At this rate, FAANG engineers will soon carry higher valuations than the companies employing them.' The AI gold rush just got a lot more interesting—and expensive.

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Runway is a global AI research and creative tech company that develops advanced multimodal AI tools, especially in video and image generation. Although the acquisition talks were preliminary and ultimately fell through, the effort highlights Meta’s ongoing strategy to expand its capabilities in video generation and creative AI technologies.

Overall, Meta is integrating AI across its ecosystem, from ad targeting and Instagram algorithms to metaverse development, boosting engagement and cutting costs to drive greater efficiency and scalability.

Meta’s AI Power Play

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has ramped up efforts to strengthen the company’s AI capabilities in recent months. Earlier this month, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, underscoring its DEEP commitment to the space. The company also brought on Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its newly formed superintelligence lab, reinforcing its strategy to attract top talent and accelerate breakthroughs in advanced AI.

In addition, Meta explored potential acquisitions of other prominent startups, including SAFE Superintelligence and Perplexity AI, as it seeks to stay ahead in the AI race. Although Meta’s bid to acquire Safe Superintelligence didn’t go through, it still secured top talent from the startup, including Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who have now joined Meta’s AI team.

Notably, five-star analyst Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson remarked that for Meta to succeed in the next phase of AI, it must capitalize on its growing momentum by effectively leveraging the “dream team” of top talent it’s putting together.

Is Meta a Good Stock to Buy Now?

On TipRanks, META stock has a consensus Strong Buy rating among 46 Wall Street analysts. That rating is based on 42 Buys, three Holds, and one Sell assigned in the last three months. The average META price target of $707.16 implies a 1.24% upside from current levels.