Meta’s AI ambitions are full speed ahead. Following the offer to acquire Safe Superintelligence, the $32 billion AI firm established by now-former OpenAI researcher Ilya Sutskever, Mark Zuckerberg has his sights on its geniuses.
Earlier this year, Meta made a bold move to buy Safe Superintelligence, the stealth-mode startup that has rapidly emerged as among the most valuable participants in the AI space. However, sources close to the matter revealed that Sutskever rejected both an offer of acquisition and an individual attempt at hiring and declined significant incentives.
Refusing to back down, Zuckerberg set his sights on Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The two tech veterans also co-lead NFDG, a venture capital platform that has funded some of the globe’s best-known AI and tech firms, such as Coinbase, Perplexity AI, Figma, and Character AI.
Gross and Friedman will reportedly join Meta as part of a broader deal in which Meta will also acquire an interest in NFDG. They will report to Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, who just joined Meta’s ranks under a $14.3 billion investment deal that also provided the firm with a 49 percent stake in Scale AI.
Meta has not yet published complete information regarding this strategic recruitment, but a company representative stated that more information regarding their “superintelligence initiative” and new recruit will be released shortly.
This step is part of Meta’s more assertive moves in the growing worldwide competition to dominate AI. Technology behemoths Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft are all vying for artificial general intelligence, AI that is as good as or perhaps even better than human intelligence. With such ambitious goals, the competition for the best AI talent has intensified.
In a recent podcast episode featuring his brother as host, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that Meta offered jaw-dropping signing bonuses of up to $100 million to lure his top engineers, but none have joined. Altman acknowledged Meta as one of the most aggressive rivals of OpenAI and confirmed that although Meta’s attempts at AI have not panned out as anticipated, their persistence and aggressive hiring tactics show they are resilient.
Meta’s hiring spree is not isolated. OpenAI stole the headlines by outlaying over $6.5 billion to poach former Apple design head Jony Ive and his hardware firm IO. Microsoft has also recently poached Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, by purchasing a significant majority in Inflection AI for $650 million.
Gross, the creator of the AI-powered search tool Cue (which Apple then acquired), was a past head of Apple’s machine learning and a Y Combinator leadership member. Friedman, on his part, left his mark by advising GitHub through its post-acquisition adjustment period after Microsoft acquired the service in 2018.
While the future of NFDG’s current portfolio remains uncertain, Meta’s majority stake means more venture-backed innovation will be incorporated into its future AI pipeline.
This talent battle is no longer about acquiring companies; it’s about stealing the dream team that can create the next generation of AI. Meta may not have signed Sutskever, but signing Gross and Friedman has made a huge move in its AI playbook.
