Former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever’s new venture, SSI, has been operating silently in the shadows with a singular goal of reaching superintelligence, but it’s having to navigate some corporate action along the way.
Meta had tried to acquire Ilya Sutskever’s startup Safe Supterintelligence (SSI), CNBC reports. Meta tried to push for the deal earlier this year. SSI, which had been valued at $32 billion in a fundraising round in April, reportedly turned Meta down.
But it turns out that Meta wasn’t done when its offer for an acquisition was refused. CNBC reports that Meta is now looking to hire SSI co-founder Daniel Gross, who is the company’s CECO, and also hire former Github CEO Nat Fridman. Gross and Friedman together run a venture firm called NFDG, their combined initials.
Daniel Gross isn’t the only high-profile figure in AI that Meta has been looking to hire in recent months. Meta has just hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead its superintelligence efforts, and acquired a stake in Scale AI for $14 billion. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed that Meta is reportedly looking to woo top AI talent with bonuses of as much as $100 million.
This frenetic activity appears to have been prompted by Meta’s recent struggles in the AI race. A while ago, Meta had come up with some capable Llama models, which had been differentiated because unlike other top companies, Meta had made them open-source. These models had become quite popular, and had been widely used by the developer community. But Meta has failed to come up with a stable reasoning model, which has meant that its models now lag Google, Anthropic and OpenAI’s offerings by a wide margin. To make matters worse, China’s DeepSeek has come out with some very capable models that are not only better than those dished out by Meta, but have an even more accessible open-source license.
SSI, for its part, has been remarkably quiet about its efforts and progress. When Sutskever had left OpenAI under dramatic circumstances after reportedly leading a failed coup against CEO Sam Altman, he’d announced SSI, a new startup that would be a one-shot approach to superintelligence. The company hasn’t yet made any announcements or released any products, but has seen its valuation zoom to $32 billion. And with it refusing a presumably generous offer from Meta, it does appear that Ilya Sutskever and SSI believe that they’re on the path towards creating something extremely valuable in the AI space.