Meta’s AI Ambitions: Zuckerberg Goes Shopping Beyond OpenAI

Mark Zuckerberg’s interest in the world of artificial intelligence goes way beyond just trying to buy a co-founder’s company. According to recent reports, Meta was actively looking to snap up several AI startups led by former OpenAI employees—not just one.

 

Here’s what’s been happening:

 

Meta, under Zuckerberg’s direction, reached out to a handful of AI startups, including Perplexity (run by ex-OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas), Safe Superintelligence (co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist), and Thinking Machines Lab (founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati).

 

None of these talks turned into actual acquisition deals. The main reasons? Disagreements about how much the companies were worth and whether they’d be a good fit for Meta’s plans. In Mira Murati’s case, her startup already had $2 billion in funding and a $10 billion valuation, which made a buyout pretty unlikely.

 

After those talks fizzled, Zuckerberg switched gears and started hiring top AI talent directly. He managed to bring on Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, in a $14 billion deal, and is now welcoming Daniel Gross (SSI’s CEO) and Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO) to lead new AI projects at Meta.

 

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has commented on the rivalry, saying Meta is offering huge paychecks to lure away top AI minds, but also noting that Meta’s recent AI releases haven’t wowed the industry.

 

With these new hires, Meta is hoping to give its AI division a serious boost and catch up with competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

 

It’s clear that Zuckerberg isn’t just interested in one big AI win—he’s trying to build a whole team of them.

 

Source: Times of India, CNBC, TechCrunch, Economic Times