By Krystal Hu
(Reuters) -Ilya Sutskever has taken over the reins of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the artificial intelligence startup he launched last year, after losing CEO Daniel Gross to an intensifying talent war in the industry.
Gross has joined Meta Platforms to lead its AI products division, sources told Reuters.
The development comes as tech giants such as Meta Platforms 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 Sutskever and acquire SSI, which was most recently valued at $32 billion, 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 on X. SSI raised $1 billion in cash last year to build advanced AI systems designed to safely exceed human intelligence.
Sutskever has previously served as OpenAI’s chief scientist. He left the ChatGPT maker, which he co‑founded, after his involvement in Sam Altman’s dramatic firing and rehiring in November 2023.
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.
Meta has offered to buy a minority stake in NFDG’s funds from limited partners through a tender offer, the sources told Reuters.
The Facebook owner did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment, while NFDG could not be reached.
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.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Krystal Hu in New York, additional reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru and Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)