Meta in advanced talks to hire Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, partially acquiring their $2B+ VC fund
Jun 18, 2025
Key Points
- Meta is in advanced talks to hire Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross and partially acquire their $2B+ venture fund NFDG, which invests in AI startups including Perplexity.
- Gross would leave Safe Superintelligence, a $32 billion lab he co-founded with Ilya Sutskever, suggesting top AI talent now prefers established platforms with user scale over pure research isolation.
- The move extends Zuckerberg's aggressive talent strategy, which includes a $14.3 billion acquisition of Scale AI and alleged $100 million-plus signing bonuses that have drawn criticism from OpenAI's Sam Altman.
Summary
Meta is in advanced talks to hire Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, and Daniel Gross, co-founder of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), to lead AI efforts. As part of the deal, Meta is negotiating to partially acquire their venture capital firm NFDG, which manages over $2 billion in assets and holds stakes in major AI startups including Perplexity and The Bot Company.
Gross would leave SSI, the AI lab founded last year with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and valued at $32 billion after raising $2 billion in April from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Green Oaks, and Sequoia. Friedman has been advising Meta on AI strategy since May 2024 and initially declined to lead efforts directly, instead recommending Alexander Wang of Scale AI. Meta closed that hire last week in a $14.3 billion deal for 49% of the company.
Both Gross and Friedman would report to or work closely with Mark Zuckerberg and Wang as part of the inner circle Zuckerberg calls his "M team." If the deal closes, it signals a sharp shift in AI's market dynamics. Unlike transformative breakthroughs in computing, where founders typically built independent upstarts rather than join incumbents, top AI talent is now willing to leave billion-dollar foundation model labs for established platforms. A founder leaving a $32 billion startup to join Meta suggests that companies with distribution, user scale, and financial feedback loops may be the better vehicle to capture AI's economic value than pure research isolation.
Zuckerberg has been aggressive on talent pricing, offering packages that dwarf traditional executive compensation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly criticized Meta's strategy this week, claiming the company extended $100 million-plus signing bonuses to OpenAI employees. Zuckerberg has spent roughly $20 billion annually on VR over recent years; cutting that spend would more than cover the full cost of Anthropic's lifetime fundraising.
The move creates immediate complications for SSI's strategy of insulating itself from short-term commercial pressure. SSI has not launched a product and has no public roadmap. Whether the capital structures needed to compete at scale—billions in annual GPU spend, ongoing reinforcement learning data loops, and access to billions of users for feedback—are compatible with a lab-only model remains in question. OpenAI became a for-profit partly because no nonprofit could marshal the capital required. Gross leaving suggests either a fundamental misalignment within SSI's founding team on structure or a pragmatic read that sustained competition requires the economic flywheels that only companies like Meta or OpenAI possess.
The deal could take multiple forms: full hires, advisory roles, board seats, or even acquisition of SSI itself. Friedman and Gross joining Meta's AI leadership alongside Wang would represent an unusual concentration of founder-operator talent in a single company's AI efforts.