Meta’s Super Intelligence Gambit: V-JEPA 2, Nine-Digit Salaries, and the Race to AGI

If you thought Mark Zuckerberg was content with just running the world’s largest social network, think again. In a move that feels straight out of a Silicon Valley fever dream, Meta (formerly Facebook) has gone all-in on artificial intelligence, with a flurry of high-profile announcements that have sent shockwaves through the tech world. First, Zuckerberg reportedly assembled a “Super Intelligence Team” with the explicit goal of achieving general artificial intelligence (AGI)—that’s right, the kind of AI that can do anything a human can do, and maybe more. And just to make sure he gets the best minds on the planet, he’s dangling nine-digit salaries. Yes, you read that correctly: nine digits. That’s a hundred million dollars or more, enough to make even the most stoic AI researcher spit out their coffee.

But the real showstopper came with the unveiling of V-JEPA 2 (Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture 2), a world model trained on video data that promises to push the boundaries of what AI can understand and do in the real world. Meta claims V-JEPA 2 can achieve “the most advanced environmental understanding and prediction capabilities,” enabling zero-shot planning and robot control in new environments. In other words, it’s a step toward AI that can look at a situation it’s never seen before and figure out what to do—just like a human (or, let’s be honest, a particularly clever dog).

So, what’s really going on here? Is Meta about to change the world (again), or is this just another round of tech hype? Let’s dive deep into the technical, strategic, and cultural implications of Meta’s latest moves, with a healthy dose of skepticism—and maybe a little awe.