Meta Approached Multiple AI Startups for Potential Acquisition

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on an artificial intelligence talent acquisition spree, reportedly approaching several high-profile AI startups for a potential acquisition.

According to multiple news reports, these startups included the following:

Perplexity AI

Runway

Thinking Machines, which was co-founded by OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati.

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist.

VC fund NFDG, founded by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, who led AI efforts at Apple. Both co-founded SSI.

Scale AI

Meta also reportedly tried to hire away OpenAI’s employees with signing bonuses of up to $100 million.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told CNBC that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is countering the offers.

“The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive,” Bosworth told CNBC.

While most of the AI startups said no to Zuckerberg, he succeeded with Scale AI. Meta is investing $14.3 billion for a 49% stake and hiring away its CEO, Alexandr Wang, who will lead superintelligence efforts.

Read more: OpenAI Winds Down Involvement With Scale AI

Meta also will partially acquire NFDG; Friedman and Gross will join Meta and work under Wang.

Zuckerberg is seeking to beef up its AI efforts after reportedly being frustrated by the pace of advancements of its flagship open-source large language model, Llama.

The company already has one of the godfathers of AI, Yann LeCun, on staff as chief AI scientist. It also already has an AI research lab, Fundamental AI Research (FAIR).

It’s not yet clear how Wang will collaborate with LeCun.

Wang is a 28-year-old MIT dropout who co-founded Scale AI, a company that provides high-quality annotated and curated data for AI models.

The recruitment push comes at a time when competition for skilled AI talent has reached a fever pitch, with companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and Anthropic vying for the same pool of geniuses.

The renewed focus on AI talent comes as Meta looks to expand the capabilities of Llama and integrate advanced AI into its products. Meta’s AI-driven features now power everything from content recommendations on Instagram to conversational assistants in WhatsApp.

The company is also exploring AI agents to enhance customer service and commerce across its platforms.

Read more: Meta Reorganizes GenAI Team to Accelerate Product Rollouts

See also: Report: Meta Delays Rollout of Behemoth AI Model Amid Performance Concerns