Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is shopping and assembling the talent for the grand AI battle of the 21st century. After spending $14.3 billion primarily to get the founder of Scale AI, it has also brought another group: “The most recent targets include Daniel Gross, co-founder of Safe Superintelligence—the secretive AI startup launched by former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever—and Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO and longtime AI investor.”
The AI talent wars are on, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is leaving no stone unturned. Meta was in talks to acquire search startup Perplexity, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources, before investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hiring founder Alexandr Wang last week. It also made a bid to buy the $32 billion AI startup Safe Superintelligence before successfully poaching CEO Daniel Gross, according to CNBC, citing anonymous sources. Ex-Github CEO Nat Friedman is also joining Meta, which is targeting rival AI talent with massive bonuses.
Good People, I truly admire how Americans run businesses: it is either you win or you go home. That is why none of the sports here has space for silver or bronze. Simply, the only trophy is GOLD. And in this AI age, everyone is looking to win GOLD.
Africa must learn how to build. I am personally jealous of how Americans (and Chinese) evaluate risks in the way they do in business. How do you pay someone $100 million salary for something you are not sure will work? How do you spend and spend and your investors do not panic?
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Safe Superintelligence was launched in 2023 by Sutskever after his dramatic exit from OpenAI. Publicly here, I had asked him to make space for our community for $5m. Unfortunately, you needed at least $100m to join the party. Today, that company is valued at $32 billion, and it has no product yet!
Nigeria and Africa, we must pursue KNOWLEDGE and ensure our own Mark, Sutskever, etc are discovered. We need them for a chance to compete in the future. That is why we must have a university with zero tuition, zero fees, etc so that every genius can be educated with no barrier. I have asked NUC to waive the onerous requirements of a 100 hectare-built campus for a license (do you expect investors to build a campus before a license?).
If they do that, some people will come with specialized campuses (not open learning which is structured for teaching with no research) and deliver impacts.
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