South Africa, Aug. 5 -- The offer, which doubled after initial negotiations stalled, was reportedly closed after direct intervention from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It's a staggering amount, not just for its size, but for what it reveals about where value-and vulnerability-now lies in the AI arms race.

Deitke, who dropped out of a PhD programme at the University of Washington, had previously co-founded a startup called Vercept, focused on autonomous agents.

He made his name at the Allen Institute for AI, where he led work on Molmo, a multimodal model that won accolades at NeurIPS 2022. His most recent product, Vy, which attempts to learn and automate a user's digital habits, received a mixed reception, with some users citing bugs and poo...