Meta the company behind Facebook) tried to buy a new AI startup called Safe

  Superintelligence SSI for $32 billion. This startup was created by Ilya Sutskever, a former top scientist at OpenAI. But he said no—he didn’t want to sell the company or join Meta.

So Meta changed tactics. Since they couldn’t get the company, they went after the people who invested in it: Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, who run a venture capital firm called NFDG. Meta is now trying to buy a $1+ billion stake in that firm, which would give them access to many other promising AI startups.

Meta also spent $14.3 billion on another company called Scale AI, and hired its young CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead their new “Superintelligence” team.

To attract top AI talent, Meta is offering huge pay packages—some over $100 million, with nine-figure signing bonuses. Even OpenAI admitted Meta is being very aggressive in hiring.

The big idea? Meta wants to control the future of AI. Instead of building everything from scratch, they’re trying to buy the best people and companies. It’s like trying to win a football game by buying the players, coaches, and even the stadium.

But here’s the twist: even after all this spending, Meta’s AI models still aren’t as good as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. So either this bold move will pay off—or they’ll waste over $50 billion trying to catch up.