Meta in advanced talks to hire Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross for billions, partially buying out their VC fund

Summary

Meta is in advanced talks to hire Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to lead AI efforts, with deal packages reportedly in the billions. The move includes discussions to partially buy out NFDG, the venture capital firm Friedman and Gross co-founded. NFDG holds stakes in major AI startups and manages over $2 billion in assets. If the deal closes, Gross would leave Safe Super Intelligence, the AI safety lab he co-founded last year with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. SSI is valued at $30 billion.

Friedman, who was CEO of GitHub before joining Microsoft, is expected to report to Alex Wang, the Scale AI CEO Meta hired in a $14.3 billion deal last week. Gross would focus primarily on AI products. Friedman's remit is expected to be broader. Both would work closely with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

What this signals about AI's trajectory

Top talent leaving early-stage AI labs to join an incumbent platform suggests AI may be a sustaining innovation rather than a disruptive one. Network effects and scale at companies like Meta may matter more than pure model capability. This dynamic differs sharply from past technology waves. No one left Google to join Yahoo, or Amazon to join Barnes & Noble. A Safe Super Intelligence co-founder walking away from a $30 billion stake to join Meta breaks that historical pattern.

How Friedman came to the role

Friedman has been advising Meta's AI efforts since at least May 2024, when he joined an advisory group. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg asked him to lead Meta's entire AI operation. Friedman declined but helped identify Wang as a candidate and convinced Zuckerberg a deal was possible. Once Wang's hiring was finalized, Zuckerberg circled back to Friedman with an offer he accepted.

Friedman had held prominent positions that could have led to larger roles at Microsoft or Apple. Gross was accepted into Y Combinator in 2010 as the youngest founder ever accepted. He sold an AI company to Apple and was seen as potential successor material before leaving to co-found SSI.

Zuckerberg's spending strategy

Zuckerberg is making outsized financial bets to consolidate talent. Sam Altman said in the Financial Times that Meta is making $100 million signing bonus offers and higher annual packages to OpenAI staff. None have taken the deals so far. Altman suggested that leading with guaranteed compensation rather than mission risks poor cultural fit.

The structural mismatch

SSI was founded on the premise of building superintelligence insulated from short-term commercial pressures. Sustaining the compute and training runs needed to advance toward that goal requires either massive nonprofit donations or commercial revenue and user feedback loops. OpenAI found that as a nonprofit untenable and had to become a for-profit to marshal billions in capital.

Scaling AI requires data feedback loops from billions of users and financial returns to justify ongoing investment. Meta's distribution advantages and ad-revenue model provide exactly that flywheel. That mismatch may explain why a co-founder with a multi-billion-dollar stake is willing to leave.

Status and possible alternatives

The reporting is from multiple sources but remains in advanced talks, not signed deals. The structure could shift. Friedman and Gross might join as advisers or board members rather than full-time executives. Meta could acquire SSI entirely. The core move signals how Zuckerberg now views talent in AI: as rare assets worth spending billions to secure, and as more valuable than sustained long-term bets on smaller labs with fewer constraints.