Last week, when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang, the founder of Scale AI, it marked just the beginning of a broader strategy, as this move came with a hefty $14.3 billion investment into the AI startup.
Zuckerberg’s spree of high-profile AI recruitments is now set to include Daniel Gross, who leads Safe Superintelligence, a startup founded by Ilya Sutskever, along with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. This information comes from various reliable sources.
This is not how Zuckerberg intended to handle negotiations.
Earlier this year, it was reported that Meta aimed to purchase Safe Superintelligence, valued at approximately $32 billion as of a fundraising round in April. However, Sutskever, who started the company just a year ago after departing OpenAI, declined Meta’s offers and an attempt to recruit him as well, according to the anonymous sources.
After those discussions fell through, Zuckerberg sought out Gross, according to insiders. Gross not only heads Safe Superintelligence but also co-manages a venture capital firm named NFDG with Friedman.
Both Gross and Friedman will join Meta under this agreement and will focus on projects led by Wang. Additionally, Meta will acquire a stake in NFDG, as reported by several sources.
The Information was the first outlet to reveal Meta’s recruitment plans for Gross and Friedman.
Neither Gross, Friedman, nor Sutskever responded to CNBC’s requests for comments.
A spokesperson for Meta stated that the company would provide updates on their superintelligence initiatives and the talented individuals joining their team soon.
Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment tactics reflect a rising competition for AI talent among major tech firms. Meta, along with Google, OpenAI, and various other large corporations and startups, are vying to create the most advanced large language models while heading towards the goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI that matches or surpasses human intelligence.
Recently, Meta agreed to invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI to onboard Wang and several other leading engineers while securing a 49% equity interest in the company.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, mentioned on the “Uncapped” podcast, hosted by his brother, that Meta has attempted to entice OpenAI employees with signing bonuses reaching up to $100 million, alongside even larger annual salary offers. Altman noted, “none of our top talent has taken them up on that.”
He added on the podcast, “I’ve heard that Meta sees us as their main competitor. Their current AI endeavors haven’t yielded the expected results, and I admire their willingness to be bold and continue seeking innovative solutions.”
Meta did not provide a response to Altman’s comments.
OpenAI has also pursued aggressive strategies, investing about $6.5 billion to hire iPhone designer Jony Ive and acquire his emerging devices startup, io.
In other developments, Google successfully recruited the founders of AI startup Character.AI last year through a multibillion-dollar agreement, and Microsoft brought on board DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman through a $650 million acquisition of talent from Inflection AI.
With Gross, Zuckerberg is gaining an experienced entrepreneur and investor in the AI space. Gross established the search engine Cue, sold to Apple in 2013. He also served as a senior executive at Apple, where he played a pivotal role in developing machine learning and Siri. Later, he became a partner at Y Combinator before co-founding Safe Superintelligence with Sutskever.
Friedman co-founded two firms before stepping in as CEO of GitHub following its acquisition by Microsoft in 2018.
Over the years, NFDG has supported companies like Coinbase, Figma, CoreWeaveCoreWeave, Perplexity, and Character.ai, according to Pitchbook. It remains unclear what will happen to its investment activities under the new Meta arrangement, a source indicated.
WATCH: Zuckerberg and Altman compete fiercely for top AI talent.
