Meta hires researcher Daniel Gross to power its AI team
What's the story
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, has hired Daniel Gross, a prominent artificial intelligence (AI) executive. Until last week, Gross was the CEO of Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a well-funded AI start-up he co-founded in 2024 with former OpenAI researchers Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy.
Acquisition strategy
Meta's initial plan was to acquire SSI
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's first plan was to acquire SSI, which was valued at $32 billion in April. However, after Sutskever rejected the offer, the company changed its strategy and decided to hire Gross instead. Sutskever has now taken over as CEO of SSI and will continue leading the company's technical teams. SSI is working on superintelligence, a future AI that could outperform humans in many tasks.
VC involvement
Meta is acquiring Gross's VC fund
Gross also runs a venture capital firm, NFDG, with Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Microsoft's GitHub unit. NFDG has a stake in SSI. Meta has reportedly offered to buy out some of the limited partners in NFDG and is looking to acquire up to 49% of the fund's holdings. However, if this deal goes through, Meta will not gain access to information from NFDG portfolio companies like SSI.
AI lab
Gross will join Friedman at Meta Superintelligence Labs
Gross will join Meta's newly launched unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), which is focused on building advanced AI models. Friedman and former Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang co-lead this unit. The latter joined MSL last month with several ex-Scale AI employees after Meta acquired 49% of the company for about $14.3 billion.
Hiring spree
Meta has also recruited several high-profile OpenAI researchers to MSL
Meta has also hired several high-profile OpenAI researchers to join MSL. The company is reportedly offering AI researchers over $100 million to join the unit. MSL will lead Meta's AI research, development of its Llama language model series, and related commercialization efforts. More AI researchers could join MSL soon as Meta has recently held talks about acquiring AI voice start-up PlayAI Inc. and hiring some of its employees.