Meta Platforms Targets Top AI Talent

Meta Platforms, previously known as Facebook, is reinforcing its strategy of attracting top artificial intelligence (AI) professionals by investing billions of dollars. According to reports, the company intends to hire Daniel Gross, the chief executive officer of Safe Superintelligence, and former Github CEO Nat Friedman. The duo operates an investment company, NFDG, in which Meta aims to acquire a stake. Safe Superintelligence was established by former OpenAI research director Ilya Sutskever, who had previously rejected Meta's advances to recruit him or acquire his startup, which made Meta approach Gross. Both Gross and Friedman will reportedly be working under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, who recently announced his plan to join the AI team of Meta. Concurrently, Meta purchased a stake in Scale AI, a deal worth billions of dollars. This AI recruitment drive comes amid reports of CEO Mark Zuckerberg showing dissatisfaction with the current progression of AI development in the company. Following this, Meta has been pushing back the release of its latest Llama 4 large language model due to concerns about insufficient improvements compared to the past versions. To expedite development, Zuckerberg is reportedly looking to establish what is being referred to within the company as a "superintelligence group", which will be seated close to him at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Despite these recruitment efforts, Meta's shares were down by almost 1% in the latest trading, but the stock has witnessed nearly a 20% rise so far in 2025.