Zuckerberg poaches AI unicorn CEO after company rejected his purchase offer

In one of the boldest talent raids in Silicon Valley’s recent history, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hired Daniel Gross, co-founder of the $32 billion AI startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI). This comes after the secretive company rejected Meta’s acquisition offer earlier this year.

According to sources cited by CNBC, Meta had approached SSI, founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, with a serious offer to acquire the company. The deal was swiftly rejected. Now, instead of owning the company, Meta is bringing its brains in-house.

Gross, along with longtime collaborator and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, will now join Meta to help lead the company’s charge toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Both are also co-founders of the influential AI venture fund NFDG, in which Meta is reportedly taking a stake as part of the deal.

The two will report to Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, who joined Meta last week following a $14.3 billion investment for a 49% stake in his company.

Zuckerberg’s superintelligence bet

The aggressive hiring spree signals how urgently Zuckerberg is moving to reposition Meta at the forefront of the AI race. Sources close to Meta say Zuckerberg has grown increasingly frustrated that rivals like OpenAI are pulling ahead, not just in foundational models, but in the consumer applications built on top of them.

Meta’s solution: buy into the ecosystem, one power player at a time.

"This is no longer just about building models,” said one investor familiar with the company’s AI ambitions. “Zuck wants the people building the future of intelligence.”

Meta goes after OpenAI staff

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed on the Uncapped podcast that Meta tried to lure his employees with signing bonuses as high as $100 million. “So far, none of our best people have taken them up on it,” Altman said, adding that Meta appears to view OpenAI as its biggest competitor.

“Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they had hoped,” he said. “But I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”

It’s been reported that Meta also tried to acquire Perplexity AI earlier this year, but the offer was rejected.

With the AI landscape increasingly defined by high-stakes dealmaking and aggressive talent acquisition, Zuckerberg seems to be embracing a new mantra: if you can’t buy the company, buy the people. And if you can’t buy the people, outbid everyone else trying.