Meta, under the leadership of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has intensified its aggressive pursuit of top artificial intelligence talent, escalating an already fierce talent war in the AI industry. This high-stakes strategy involves significant investments and strategic hires, aimed at bolstering Meta's efforts in developing powerful large language models and advancing towards artificial general intelligence (AGI).

A notable part of this aggressive push was Meta's recent $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, which brought its founder, Alexandr Wang, along with other top engineers, into Meta's fold. This deal also granted Meta a 49% stake in Scale AI. However, Meta's talent acquisition ambitions did not stop there. The company subsequently set its sights on Daniel Gross, CEO of Ilya Sutskever’s startup Safe Superintelligence, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Sources indicate that Meta had previously attempted to acquire Safe Superintelligence earlier in the year, a startup reportedly valued at $32 billion in April. Despite these efforts and an attempt to hire Sutskever, who had just launched the startup a year prior after leaving OpenAI, Sutskever rebuffed Meta's advances. Following the failure of these negotiations, Zuckerberg pivoted to engage with Gross. Daniel Gross, alongside Nat Friedman, co-runs a venture capital firm known as NFDG. Both Gross and Friedman are now joining Meta as part of this transaction, and will be working on products under Alexandr Wang. As part of this arrangement, Meta will also acquire a stake in NFDG.

The current climate in the AI sector is characterized by an intense race among major players like Meta, Google, and OpenAI, alongside numerous high-valued startups, all vying to develop the most sophisticated AI systems. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for instance, has publicly stated that Meta views OpenAI as its primary competitor and has attempted to poach OpenAI employees with significant signing bonuses, reportedly as high as $100 million, coupled with even larger annual compensation packages. Altman, however, maintained that none of OpenAI’s top talent had accepted these offers.

The escalating talent war is not unique to Meta. Other major technology companies have also made substantial moves to secure AI expertise. OpenAI itself invested approximately $6.5 billion to bring in iPhone designer Jony Ive and acquire his nascent devices startup, io. Similarly, the founders of AI startup Character.AI were recruited back to Google last year in a multi-billion-dollar deal. Microsoft, in turn, acquired talent from Inflection AI, including co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, in a $650 million transaction.

Daniel Gross brings a wealth of entrepreneurial and AI investment experience to Meta. He founded the search engine Cue, which Apple acquired in 2013, and subsequently served as a top executive at Apple, where he contributed to machine learning efforts and the development of Siri. He later became a partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator before co-founding Safe Superintelligence with Ilya Sutskever. Nat Friedman, on the other hand, co-founded two startups prior to becoming the CEO of GitHub after Microsoft's acquisition of the code-sharing platform in 2018. NFDG, the venture capital firm run by Gross and Friedman, has backed prominent companies such as Coinbase, Figma, CoreWeave, Perplexity, and Character.ai over the years.