Meta has recruited Daniel Gross, the CEO of OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI). SSI, which was founded in 2024 by Sutskever, Gross, and notable AI researcher Daniel Levy, was valued at $32 billion in April.
Meta originally planned to acquire the startup, however, it ended up recruiting Gross instead when Sutskever turned down both the acquisition deal and the company’s attempts to hire him.
Soon after the failed acquisition attempt, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg started negotiating with Gross. In addition to his role at Safe Superintelligence, Gross runs a venture capital firm with Github CEO Nat Friedman — who’s also been hired by Meta — called NFDG.
READ: OpenAI eyes $500 million acquisition of Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s new AI hardware startup
According to CNBC, A Meta spokesperson said the company “will share more about our superintelligence effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.” In addition to Gross and Friedman, Meta also recently hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Gross and Friedman will be working on products under Wang. Meanwhile, Meta will also get a stake in NFDG.
Meta’s aggressive hiring tactics are believed to be an effort in the race to develop powerful large language models and to reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Last week, Meta had agreed to invest $14.3 billion into Scale AI to bring on Wang and a few other top engineers while getting a 49% stake in the startup. This move has been seen as an attempt to accelerate efforts towards “superintelligence”, type of AI that can perform better than humans at all tasks. Wang will reportedly be leading a new AI lab dedicated to the pursuit of superintelligence.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the latest episode of the “Uncapped” podcast, which is hosted by his brother, that Meta has tried to lure OpenAI employees by offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million, with even larger annual compensation packages. Altman said “none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” According to Bloomberg, Meta tried to poach one of OpenAI’s lead researchers Noam Brown, as well as Google’s AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu. However, both efforts were unsuccessful.
OpenAI has also undertaken similar efforts, paying about $6.5 billion to hire iPhone designer Jony Ive and to acquire his nascent devices startup io. Meanwhile, the founders of AI startup Character.AI were recruited back to Google last year in a multibillion-dollar deal, while DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman was brought on by Microsoft for $650 million.
Gross had also previously founded the search engine Cue, which was acquired by Apple
in 2013. He was a top executive at Apple and helped lead machine learning efforts and the development of Siri. He was later a partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator, before co‑founding Safe Superintelligence alongside Sutskever. Friedman co-founded two startups before becoming the CEO of GitHub following Microsoft’s acquisition of the code-sharing platform in 2018.