Meta's "people and company" style expansion: spending $14.3 billion to acquire Scale AI, and then poaching the core team of Safe Superintelligence

According to informed sources, following last week's investment of $14.3 billion by Meta (META.US) CEO Mark Zuckerberg in AI startup Scale AI and the poaching of its founder Alexandr Wang, this multi-billion dollar talent war in AI has now targeted new goals—Daniel Gross, CEO of Safe Superintelligence founded by Ilya Sutskever, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

This talent recruitment stems from Meta's failed acquisition earlier this year. Sources say that Meta attempted to acquire Safe Superintelligence, a company founded by former OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Sutskever a year after his departure, which was valued at $32 billion during its funding round in April.

Sutskever not only rejected Meta's acquisition proposal but also declined an invitation to join the company. After the negotiations broke down, Zuckerberg quickly turned to negotiate with CEO Gross. As part of the deal, the venture capital firm NFDG, co-operated by Gross and former GitHub CEO Friedman, will receive investment from Meta, and the two will join the Meta team under Alexandr Wang to be responsible for product development.

Zuckerberg's aggressive poaching actions have pushed the AI talent war to new heights. Tech giants like Meta, Google, and OpenAI are competing to develop the strongest large language models, racing towards artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Last week, Meta's investment in Scale AI secured it a 49% stake, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed in a podcast that Meta had attempted to poach talent with a $100 million signing bonus and a higher annual salary, but was unsuccessful: "They see us as their biggest competitor, but currently, AI progress has not met expectations. I still have great respect for those who are ambitious and continue to try new things."

The talent war has evolved into a dual game of capital and technology. OpenAI spent $6.5 billion to acquire the startup io founded by iPhone designer Jony Ive; Google brought back the founders of AI company Character.AI for billions of dollars last year; and Microsoft poached DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman from Inflection AI for $650 million.

Gross, as a serial entrepreneur and AI investor, founded the search engine Cue, which was acquired by Apple in 2013. He was an executive at Apple, leading machine learning work and the development of Siri. He later became a partner at the startup accelerator Y Combinator and co-founded Safe Superintelligence with Sutskever Friedman became the CEO after Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. According to Pitchbook data, the NFDG co-founded by the two has supported star companies such as Coinbase (COIN.US), Figma, CoreWeave (CRWV.US), Perplexity, and Character.ai in the past. It is currently unclear what impact a potential deal with Meta would have on NFDG's portfolio, but this talent war also highlights the extreme demand for top talent among tech giants in the AGI race