Inside Meta’s High-Stakes AI Power Play: A Failed Acquisition, a Billion-Dollar Talent Grab, and the Race Toward Superintelligence
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The Opening Move: A Bid for Safe Superintelligence
In early 2025, Meta set its sights on one of the most elusive and high-potential companies in the AI world: Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)—a startup founded by none other than Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI. SSI had generated enormous buzz within tech and investment circles after raising a round that reportedly valued the company at *\$32 billion, despite being less than a year old.
Meta saw an opportunity. With OpenAI out of reach and DeepMind tied to Google, SSI represented a fresh start—an AI-first company founded by a world-class scientist, aiming to push the boundaries of safe and aligned superintelligence. Meta approached SSI with a buyout offer and even offered Sutskever a prominent role within its AI division.
But Sutskever wasn’t interested.
Sources say he rejected both the acquisition and the job offer, determined to retain the independence and focus of his new venture. For Meta, this rejection was a turning point—not a dead end, but a challenge.
The Tactical Pivot: Hire the Minds Behind the Mission
Denied the company, Meta turned to a more surgical strategy: recruit the people who built it.
Leading that list was Daniel Gross, CEO and co-founder of Safe Superintelligence. Gross is a well-known name in Silicon Valley—an entrepreneur, investor, and AI builder with an eye for frontier innovation. He previously founded Cue, a context-aware search engine acquired by Apple in 2013, then became a key part of Apple’s AI team. Later, he served as a partner at Y Combinator, mentoring dozens of startups and deepening his roots in the early-stage tech world.
Partnered with Gross was Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO and a longtime open-source advocate. Friedman had steered GitHub through its most transformative phase after Microsoft’s \$7.5 billion acquisition in 2018, and then turned to AI investing and startup incubation alongside Gross.
Together, Gross and Friedman co-founded the venture firm NFDG (named after their initials), which had quietly become one of the most influential AI-focused venture outfits. Their portfolio included early bets on Coinbase, Figma, CoreWeave, **Perplexity AI, and Character.AI.
Instead of chasing the company, Meta chose to bring Gross and Friedman in directly.
Meta’s Strategic AI Hiring Spree
The hiring of Gross and Friedman wasn’t an isolated move. It was part of a larger pattern of hyper-aggressive recruitment by Meta to build an elite team of AI founders, operators, and visionaries.
Just days earlier, Meta had committed \$14.3 billion* to partner with Scale AI, bringing its founder Alexandr Wang and several top engineers onboard. In exchange, Meta took a 49% equity stake in Scale, making it one of the most significant corporate investments in the AI sector to date.
This isn’t traditional corporate hiring—it’s more like assembling a superteam. These aren’t employees. They’re founders of billion-dollar companies, treated more like partners than recruits.
With Gross, Friedman, and Wang now working together inside Meta, the company is forming a formidable in-house collective of AGI-focused leaders.
Why This Matters: The AI War Is Now About People
Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Anthropic are all locked in a fierce global race toward AGI—Artificial General Intelligence, or systems capable of reasoning, problem-solving, and learning across domains as well as or better than humans.
In this race, data and compute matter. Algorithms matter. But increasingly, the most valuable asset is talent.
Meta has realized this. And it's willing to spend billions to secure the people who can build the next major leaps in AI. The company has reportedly offered signing bonuses in the tens—sometimes hundreds—of millions to attract AI leaders. Compensation packages being discussed are closer to venture capital returns than engineering salaries.
This marks a shift from the traditional tech hiring model to a more VC-style acquisition of people: less about buying companies, more about bringing ecosystems and networks under one roof.
What Gross and Friedman Bring to Meta
Daniel Gross
Founded Cue, sold to Apple in 2013.
Led machine learning and AI projects at Apple.
Served as a partner at Y Combinator, mentoring next-gen AI founders.
Co-founded Safe Superintelligence with Sutskever.
Co-manages NFDG, a top-tier venture firm focused on AI and deep tech.
Nat Friedman
Co-founded developer-focused startups Ximian and Xamarin.
Became CEO of GitHub post-Microsoft acquisition.
Champion of open-source and developer-first platforms.
Partner at NFDG, deeply connected to the AI and open-source ecosystem.
They bring not just technical expertise, but access to elite talent networks, founder credibility, and a portfolio of relationships across the industry.
What Happens to NFDG?
One of the more intriguing questions is what Meta’s investment in NFDG will mean for the firm itself. Will it continue to operate independently? Will its future investments align with Meta’s strategic roadmap? What will happen to its existing investments in companies that may compete with Meta?
Insiders say the structure is still being finalized. But Meta’s interest in NFDG underscores how the company sees *venture capital as a strategic front in the AI war*—a way to get early access to promising startups, technology, and people.
Where This Leaves the Competition
OpenAI remains the most prominent name in AI, and CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that Meta is trying to poach its top engineers—offering massive bonuses and high-prestige roles.
“None of our best people have taken the offers,” Altman recently said. “But Meta sees us as their biggest threat—and they’re acting like it.”
Microsoft, which backs OpenAI and recently hired Mustafa Suleyman from Inflection AI, has also spent heavily to bring in foundational talent. Google has pulled former startup founders back to DeepMind. Apple quietly continues to recruit AI researchers and ex-startup teams as well.
But in terms of scale, visibility, and risk-taking, Meta’s recent spree stands out.
It’s not only rewriting its org chart—it’s redefining what a tech company looks like in the age of AGI.
Conclusion: Meta’s Bet on People, Not Just Models
What Meta is building isn’t just an AI team—it’s an AI brain trust, composed of founders, CEOs, researchers, investors, and engineers who have already proven they can move the frontier forward.
With Sutskever out of reach, Meta opted for the next best thing: the minds he trusted enough to build Safe Superintelligence with him.
Time will tell whether this approach pays off. But one thing is clear: in the 2025 AI landscape, the battle is no longer just about who has the best models—it’s about who has the minds that will build what comes next.