Mark Zukerberg is expanding Meta’s focus on artificial intelligence. Meta attempted to acquire Safe Superintelligence. They are looking for top executives from companies tied to Microsoft and OpenAI. Meta invested extensively on Scale AI. Alexander Wang now heads Meta’s new AI lab. According to Sam Altman, OpenAI’s staff rejected Meta’s offerings. Employees at OpenAI believe in the company’s potential for superintelligence.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is working to double down on his AI ambitions, according to new reports. Meta is not only willing to spend billions of dollars on AI acquisitions, but it is also strategically targeting and recruiting top executives, including CEOs from companies with ties to rivals Microsoft and OpenAI.
How Safe Is Meta’s New Superintelligence Strategy?
According to reports, Meta recently attempted to buy Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI business co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI chief scientist. While Sutskever reportedly turned down Meta’s buyout approach, Zuckerberg quickly shifted his focus to recruiting SSI’s CEO and co-founder, Daniel Gross.
These advances come on the heels of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, a well-known data labeling and model validation business. As part of that historic agreement, Scale AI’s 28-year-old founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, has already moved to Meta, where he leads a newly formed “superintelligence” lab and reports directly to Zuckerberg. According to reports, if they are successfully onboarded, Gross and Friedman will work on major AI efforts led by Wang.
This aggressive recruitment effort demonstrates the high importance placed on top AI researchers and executives in today’s technology ecosystem. Sam Altman explains why ChatGPT’s ‘best individuals’ rejected Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million offer.
Why one of the Top Engineers Turned down Facebook’s Boss?
Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered a harsh assessment of Meta’s innovation skills, explaining why his top engineers declined Mark Zuckerberg’s eye-watering $100 million signing bonus.
“There’s many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation,” says Altman. Speaking candidly about Meta’s aggressive poaching attempts, Altman revealed that the Facebook founder had “started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team” but boasted that “none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
The OpenAI CEO claimed that his staff see the company as having “a much better shot actually, delivering a superintelligence and also may eventually be the more valuable company.” Despite Meta’s 1.77 trillion market capitalization dwarfing OpenAI’s $300 billion valuation, the ChatGPT maker’s engineers remain sceptical about pure financial motivations.