Mark Zuckerberg is accelerating his plan to dominate the next frontier of technology: artificial intelligence. In a sweeping recruitment offensive that’s rattled Silicon Valley, the Meta CEO is aggressively poaching top minds from rival AI firms and investing billions of dollars to build his “AI empire.”
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. They had earlier reportedly rejected an acquisition bid for their company, which underscores how deeply Zuckerberg is reaching into the heart of AI’s elite circle.
This hiring attempt follows Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, a fast-rising data-labeling and AI infrastructure company, bringing on board its 27-year-old founder Alexandr Wang and several of his top engineers. Scale AI is now reportedly working closely with Meta’s AI division, with Wang taking on a leading role in developing advanced large language models and data tools.
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Zuckerberg’s plan is understood to be – to build the most powerful AI team in the world—fast.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg attempted to acquire Safe Superintelligence outright. The startup, launched in 2023 by Sutskever after his dramatic exit from OpenAI, had recently been valued at $32 billion. But Sutskever rejected Meta’s offer, refusing both acquisition and a direct leadership role.
Undeterred, Zuckerberg went after the next best thing: Gross and Friedman, Sutskever’s co-founders. Sources say Meta sweetened the deal by also acquiring a stake in NFDG, the venture capital firm jointly run by Gross and Friedman, known for early bets on AI and tech unicorns like CoreWeave, Figma, Perplexity, Coinbase, and Character.AI.
Meta reportedly plans to integrate Gross and Friedman under the leadership of Scale AI’s Wang, signaling a power consolidation of AI expertise within the company.
Talent War Reaches New Heights
This move further escalates the ongoing AI talent war between Meta and rivals like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. In a recent episode of the Uncapped podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman disclosed that Meta had offered some of his top engineers signing bonuses of up to $100 million, with lucrative compensation packages aimed at luring them away.
“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said. “Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they had hoped, and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”
Though Altman said none of his “best people” had taken the bait, industry insiders say Meta’s cash-heavy offers are shaking up compensation norms across the sector.
Meta declined to comment on Altman’s remarks but acknowledged that more announcements are coming. A company spokesperson said, “We will share more about our superintelligence effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.”
With its Reality Labs bleeding billions and the metaverse still struggling to gain traction, Zuckerberg appears to be shifting Meta’s core bet toward AI, betting that breakthroughs in LLMs, autonomous agents, and eventually artificial general intelligence (AGI) will define the next era of computing.
Scale AI, now a major partner, provides the data infrastructure necessary to train such systems. Wang, its founder, launched Scale at 19 and turned it into a key supplier of high-quality datasets to firms like OpenAI, Nvidia, and the US government. His move to Meta, insiders say, gives the company deep bench strength in both talent and tools.
Gross, meanwhile, has a formidable track record. He sold his search engine Cue to Apple in 2013, helped lead Siri’s evolution, and later joined Y Combinator before diving into AI research and venture investing. Friedman was instrumental in transforming GitHub under Microsoft and has remained a powerful force in open-source and AI investing.
Meta’s new AI target trio—Wang, Gross, and Friedman—represent not just elite engineering minds but strategic operators with deep knowledge of data pipelines, model development, and the investor networks funding the next wave of AI labs.
If Meta succeeds, they will become part of a field of tech giants racing for dominance. Microsoft recently bought its way into AI supremacy by hiring DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and absorbing Inflection AI in a $650 million deal. OpenAI has brought on Jony Ive, the legendary Apple designer, in a $6.5 billion creative partnership. Google lured back the founders of Character.AI last year.
But Zuckerberg isn’t just buying startups—he’s buying brainpower.
If Meta’s AI gamble pays off, the company may leap ahead in the competition to build AI systems that surpass human capabilities. If it fails, the costs—both financial and reputational—will be massive.
Either way, the AI war is becoming personal, aggressive, and heavily funded, and Zuckerberg is making clear he intends to win it.