Meta tried to buy Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, now going for execs

UPDATED. OpenAI pioneer Sutskever started the company a year ago, after leaving OpenAI during the CEO and boardroom scuffle, and it was valued at $32 billion during a recent funding round, reports CNBC.

They rebuffed Meta’s buyout offer, CNBC writes, claiming information from anonymous sources close to the transaction.

Now, Meta has turned their eyes to recruiting the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence and the previous AI chief at Apple, Daniel Gross, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who run an AI venture fund together— which Meta would hold a stake in as part of the deal.

All in on superintelligence
After going all in on AI «superintelligence» and acqui-hiring Scale AIs CEO Alexandr Wang along with a small team for $14.3 billion last week, Meta shows no sign of slowing down.

Both Gross and Friedman will now start working at Meta under Wang’s superintelligence group, with Meta promising that they «will share more about our superintelligence effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks,» writes CNBC.

«Making giant offers» to OpenAI’s talent
During a recent podcast interview on «Uncapped»’s last episode, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta had tried poaching top talent from the company for «100s of millions of dollars» in signing bonuses and similar salaries.

Meta sees OpenAI as their largest competitor and therefore «started making giant offers,» said Altman, adding that OpenAI has a «much better shot on delivering superintelligence» and that’s what «people want to work on.»

UPDATE 06/21/25: It seems Meta has been more active than previously thought. In it’s recent hiring/buying spree for their superintelligence team, they have been in acquision talks with Perplexity.ai and with another OpenAI alumn, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, recently valued at $10 billion. None of these talks progressed into formal offers.

Read more: CNBC has thorough reporting, The Information broke the news, but is paywalled. See also: Meta invests $14.3 billion in infrastructure company Scale AI, rivals leaving, on teknotum.