Meta Poaches the CEO of a $32 Billion AI Startup — After Trying to Buy the Company and Being Told No Meta is reportedly offering up to nine figures in compensation for AI researchers, amounting to $100 million signing bonuses and even higher overall pay.

Meta is taking an aggressive approach to hiring new members of its Superintelligence lab, the group tasked with developing AI that is more intelligent than human beings.

CNBC reports that earlier this year, Meta attempted to acquire Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a top AI startup valued at $32 billion. OpenAI founding member Ilya Sutskever co-founded SSI in June 2024, one month after leaving his post as chief scientist at OpenAI. The startup aims to take a security-first approach to building superintelligence, or an AI with advanced capabilities.

Sutskever reportedly turned down Meta's offer to buy SSI and refused Meta's offer to hire him, sources told CNBC. Meta then began talks for a possible deal with SSI's CEO, Daniel Gross, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Gross and Friedman run a venture capital firm together called NFDG, named after the combination of their initials.

Related: Meet Alexandr Wang, the 28-Year-Old Who Went from MIT Dropout to Billionaire Meta Hire: 'I Wanted to Make a Difference'

Now, multiple sources tell CNBC that Meta is taking a stake in NFDG in exchange for Gross and Friedman joining Meta as part of its Superintelligence lab. The size of Meta's investment in NFDG is unclear.

Gross and Friedman will reportedly work on AI products at Meta under another new hire: Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Wang announced last week that he would be leaving Scale AI for Meta as part of a $14.3 billion investment Meta made in the startup.

^{SSI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP}

The new hires will reportedly be compensated well. According to a Bloomberg report last week, Meta is offering up to a nine-figure pay for researchers on its Superintelligence team. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed this week that Meta tried to recruit OpenAI researchers by offering $100 million signing bonuses and even higher compensation packages as leverage.

According to Bloomberg, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been personally leading the recruitment effort for the Superintelligence team. He has invited leading AI researchers and engineers from other companies to meet with him at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe to talk about offers to join Meta. Zuckerberg's aim is for Meta to be the first company to achieve superintelligence, which it can then use to power its products, like its AI chatbot and AI smart glasses.

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Meta's move to bring on fresh talent like Wang, Gross, and Friedman arrives as the company tries to hold onto existing AI talent. Menlo Ventures venture capitalist Deedy Das posted on X last week that he had heard of three cases last week of Meta losing AI researchers to OpenAI and Anthropic despite offering compensation of $2 million or more.

"The AI talent wars are absolutely ridiculous," Das wrote.

Meta is currently offering $2M+/yr in offers for AI talent and still losing them to OpenAI and Anthropic. Heard ~3 such cases this week.

The AI talent wars are absolutely ridiculous.

Today, Anthropic has the highest ~80% retention 2 years in and is the #1 (large) company top AI… pic.twitter.com/YSv5UNV5H2

— Deedy (@deedydas) June 10, 2025

Meta stock was up 15% year-to-date at the time of writing.