It looks like Zuckerberg was just getting started when he lured Scale AI founder Alexander Wang to Meta. Now he wants to hire Daniel Gross, CEO of Ilya Sutzkever's startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI), and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
It looks like Zuckerberg was just getting started when he lured Scale AI founder Alexander Wang to Meta. Now he wants to hire Daniel Gross, CEO of Ilya Sutzkever's startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI), and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
Meta has tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup run by OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientific officer Ilya Sutzkever. The tech giant has also tried to hire him, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is confidential, CNBC reported .
Recall that in April, Safe Superintelligence raised additional funding of $2 billion at a valuation of $32 billion.
Ilya Sutzkever rejected both offers, sources say. So Meta decided to go the other way and hire SSI CEO Daniel Gross. They also approached former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. In addition, both run the venture firm NFDG.
Gross and Friedman join Meta as part of the deal and will work on products under Wang's leadership. The tech giant will also receive a stake in NFDG.
This month, Meta invested $14.3 billion in AI startup Scale AI and hired its CEO Alexander Wang. But big clients didn’t like the changes and started to abandon Scale AI’s services , including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.
Zuckerberg's aggressive hiring tactics are fueling a war for AI talent that has reached new heights in recent times. Sam Altman recently revealed that Meta is offering OpenAI employees compensation packages worth more than $100 million .
In Gross, Zuckerberg gets an entrepreneur and investor in AI. He founded the search engine Cue, which Apple acquired in 2013. He was also a senior executive at Apple and helped lead the machine learning effort and the development of Siri. He later was a partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator before co-founding SafeSuperintelligence with Sutskever.
Friedman co-founded two startups before becoming CEO of GitHub after Microsoft acquired the code-sharing platform in 2018.
