Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

is working on doubling down on his AI ambitions, with fresh reports indicating Meta is not only prepared to spend billions on

AI acquisitions

but is now strategically targeting and recruiting top executives, including CEOs, from companies with ties to rivals Microsoft and OpenAI. According to a CNBC report, Meta recently made an attempt to acquire

Safe Superintelligence

(SSI), the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. While Sutskever reportedly rejected Meta's takeover bid, Zuckerberg swiftly pivoted his focus to recruiting SSI's CEO and co-founder, Daniel Gross. urther escalating its talent grab, Meta is also reportedly in advanced discussions to bring on

Nat Friedman

, the influential former CEO of GitHub, a company owned by Microsoft.These developments follow closely on the heels of Meta's substantial $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, a prominent data-labeling and model evaluation startup. As part of that landmark deal, Scale AI's 28-year-old founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, has already transitioned to Meta, where he is now leading a newly formed "superintelligence" lab and reporting directly to Zuckerberg. Reports suggest that if successfully onboarded, Gross and Friedman would also work on key AI initiatives under Wang's leadership.This aggressive recruitment strategy highlights the immense value placed on leading AI researchers and executives in the current tech landscape.Sam Altman reveals why ChatGPT maker's 'best people' rejected Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers

Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a brutal assessment of Meta's innovation capabilities, explaining why his top engineers turned down Mark Zuckerberg's eye-watering $100 million signing bonuses."There's many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don't think they're a company that's great at innovation," said Altman. Speaking candidly about Meta's aggressive poaching attempts, Altman said the Facebook founder had "started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team" but boasted that "none of our best people have decided to take them up on that."The OpenAI chief suggested his employees see the company as having "a much better shot actually, delivering on superintelligence and also may eventually be the more valuable company." Despite Meta's $1.77 trillion market cap dwarfing OpenAI's $300 billion valuation, the ChatGPT maker's engineers appear unconvinced by pure financial incentives.