Meta Platforms Inc. has hired prominent artificial intelligence executive Daniel Gross and may reportedly buy a stake in his venture capital firm.

Until last week, Gross (pictured) was chief executive of Safe Superintelligence Inc., a well-funded AI startup. He co-founded the company last year with former OpenAI researchers Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy. Sutskever revealed Gross’ departure in a post on X today.

Reports of Meta’s intent to hire Gross first emerged in mid-June. It’s believed that the Facebook parent’s original plan was to buy SSI, which reportedly received a $32 billion valuation in April. Meta shifted its focus to hiring Gross after Sutskever rebuffed the takeover offer.

Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist, has succeeded Gross as the CEO of SSI. He will continue to oversee the company’s technical teams. SSI is working on superintelligence, a term for a hypothetical future variety of AI that can perform many tasks better than humans.

“You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us,” Sutskever wrote on X. “We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through.”

Although Meta’s reported attempt to buy SSI was unsuccessful, it could still obtain an indirect stake in the startup.

Gross operates a venture capital firm called NFDG together with Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub unit. NFDG has a stake in SSI. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Meta has offered to buy out some of the limited partners in NFDG.

The Facebook parent is reportedly seeking to purchase up to 49% of the fund’s holdings. According to the Journal, Meta wouldn’t receive access to information from NFDG portfolio companies such as SSI if the deal goes through.

Gross will join Meta’s newly launched Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, unit, which is working to develop highly advanced AI models similarly to SSI. Friedman co-leads the unit together with former Scale AI CEO Inc. Alexander Wang. The latter executive and several former Scale AI employees joined MSL last month after Meta parent invested $14.3 billion in the startup.

The Facebook parent has also recruited several high-profile OpenAI researchers to the unit. Recent reports indicate that the company is offering AI researchers upwards of $100 million to join MSL. The unit will lead Meta’s AI research initiatives, the development of its Llama language model series and the associated commercialization initiatives.

More AI researchers may join MSL in the near future. According to Bloomberg, Meta has recently held discussions about buying AI voice startup PlayAI Inc. and hiring several of its employees. It’s also believed that the company approached Perplexity AI Inc. about a potential acquisition earlier this year. 

Photo: Daniel Gross