How to Become an AI Genius: Lessons students can learn from Meta's $100 million hires

If you want to become an AI genius – the kind that Mark Zuckerberg offers $50–$100 million to join his quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI) – here’s the blueprint, decoded from Meta ’s elite hires.


1. Build a rock-solid maths foundationAlmost every AI superstar Meta poached – from Lucas Beyer to Trapit Bansal – started with hardcore mathematics or computer science degrees. Linear algebra, calculus, probability, and optimisation aren’t optional. They are your bread and butter.

Why? Because AI models are just giant stacks of matrix multiplications optimised over billions of parameters. If you can’t handle eigenvectors or gradient descent, you’ll be stuck fine-tuning open-source models instead of inventing the next GPT-5.


2. Specialise in deep learning Next comes deep learning mastery. Study neural networks , convolutional networks for vision, transformers for language, and recurrent models for sequence data. The Vision Transformer (ViT) co-created by Lucas Beyer and Alexander Kolesnikov redefined computer vision precisely because they understood both transformer architectures and vision systems deeply.

Recommended learning path:

• Undergraduate/early coursework: Machine learning, statistics, data structures, algorithms.
  
• Graduate-level depth: Neural network architectures, representation learning, reinforcement learning.
  
  
  

3. Research, research, researchThe real differentiator isn’t coding ability alone. It’s original research. Look at Meta’s dream team:

• Jack Rae did a PhD in neural memory and reasoning.
  
  
• Xiaohua Zhai published groundbreaking papers on large-scale vision transformers.
  
  
• Trapit Bansal earned his PhD in meta-learning and reinforcement learning at UMass Amherst before co-creating OpenAI’s o-series reasoning models.
  
  

Top AI labs hire researchers who push knowledge forward, not just engineers who implement existing algorithms. This means:

• Reading papers daily (Arxiv sanity or Twitter AI circles help).
  
  
• Writing papers for conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ACL.
  
  
  

4. Dive into multimodal and reasoning systems
If you want to be at the AGI frontier, focus on multimodal AI (vision + language + speech) and reasoning/planning systems.

Why? Because AGI isn’t just about language models completing your sentences. It’s about:

• Understanding images, videos, and speech seamlessly
  
• Performing logical reasoning and planning over long contexts
  
  

For example, Hongyu Ren’s work combines knowledge graphs with LLMs to improve question answering. Jack Rae focuses on LLM memory and chain-of-thought reasoning. This is the cutting edge.


5. Optimise your engineering skills
Finally, remember that AI breakthroughs don’t live in papers alone. They need to run efficiently at scale. Pei Sun and Joel Pobar are prime examples: engineering leaders who ensure giant models run on hardware without melting the data centre.

Learn:

• Distributed training frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow)
  
• Systems optimisation (CUDA, GPUs, AI accelerators)
  
• Software engineering best practices for scalable deployment
  
  

The bottom line
Becoming an AI genius isn’t about quick YouTube tutorials. It’s about mastering mathematics, deep learning architectures, original research, multimodal reasoning, and scalable engineering. Do this, and maybe one day, Mark Zuckerberg will knock on your door offering you a $50 million signing bonus to build his artificial god.

Until then, back to those linear algebra problem sets. The future belongs to those who understand tensors.