Sutskever to lead Safe Superintelligence after Meta poaches CEO Gross in AI talent war
Gross has joined Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab to lead its AI products division, sources told Reuters.
The development comes as tech giants such as Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab aggressively chase high-profile acquisitions and offer multi-million-dollar pay packages to attract top talent in the race to lead the next wave of artificial intelligence.
Meta had also attempted to recruit Ilya Sutskever and acquire SSI, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
"You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us. We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through," Sutskever said in a post, opens new tab on X. SSI raised $1 billion in cash last year to build advanced AI systems designed to safely exceed human intelligence.
Gross did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched a new division, Meta Superintelligence Labs, to unify the company's AI efforts, following setbacks with its Llama 4 model and key staff departures.
The unit will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman, after Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale and ramped up efforts to recruit top AI talent.
Gross and Friedman are known to be close, having co-founded the venture capital firm NFDG — named after their initials. The firm has backed high-profile startups including Safe Superintelligence, Perplexity and Figma.
Apple acquired Gross's startup, Cue, in 2013 for its predictive search and AI technology, after which Gross joined the iPhone maker as a director, overseeing machine learning and artificial intelligence.
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