Meta Bolsters AI Ambitions With High-Profile Hire of Daniel Gross for Superintelligence Labs

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hired Daniel Gross, former CEO and co-founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), to join Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)-a newly formed division accelerating the company's push into advanced AI. The move signals Meta's aggressive strategy to compete with rivals like OpenAI and Google in the race for artificial superintelligence.

Gross, who previously led SSI alongside OpenAI's ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, will focus on AI product development within MSL. His hiring follows Meta's recent $14.3 billion acquisition of Scale AI, which brought on its former CEO, Alexandr Wang, as Meta's chief AI officer. Wang co-leads MSL with ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, overseeing AI research and product development.

Zuckerberg has been personally recruiting top AI talent, hosting meetings at his Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto homes to lure researchers from leading firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. So far, Meta has secured 11 high-profile hires, offering compensation packages reportedly reaching nine figures to attract elite expertise.

Gross's departure leaves SSI under new leadership, with Sutskever taking over as CEO and Daniel Levy stepping in as president. Before SSI, Gross was a tech investor, co-founded the startup Cue (acquired by Apple in 2013), and worked on AI projects at Apple. He also served as a partner at Y Combinator, further solidifying his Silicon Valley credentials.

Zuckerberg believes Meta's robust advertising revenue gives it a financial edge over competitors reliant on external funding, allowing the company to invest heavily in AI infrastructure, including multi-gigawatt data centers. His ultimate goal? Developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) that surpasses human cognitive abilities across all domains.

With this latest hire, Meta continues to position itself as a dominant force in the escalating AI arms race.