Ilya Sutskever.

“I expect miracles”: Gross hails Safe Superintelligence’s future as he joins Meta

Co-founder leaves the $32 billion startup while Meta gains a stake in his venture arm.

Daniel Gross, one of the co-founders of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), has officially left the secretive AI startup he helped launch just a year ago. Gross’s exit, confirmed on Thursday by SSI co-founder Ilya Sutskever in a message to employees and investors, marks a notable shift inside one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched AI companies.
In his own farewell, Gross posted: “Ilya and Daniel have assembled an incredible team and I'm honored to have been able to assist in getting SSI off the ground. The company's future is very bright, and I expect miracles to follow.”
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Ilya Sutskever.
Ilya Sutskever.
Ilya Sutskever.
(Photo: Avigail Uzi)
In a note posted publicly, Sutskever thanked Gross for his early role in building the $32 billion startup and wished him well. The statement also dismissed rumors that SSI might be acquired, underscoring Sutskever’s intention to keep the company independent.
Gross’s next chapter, however, is already coming into view, and it points directly to Mark Zuckerberg’s increasingly aggressive push to position Meta at the center of the race for artificial general intelligence. After an unsuccessful attempt to acquire SSI outright, Meta has hired Gross and his longtime collaborator, Nat Friedman, who together run the influential early-stage venture fund NFDG. According to reports, Meta is also acquiring a stake in NFDG as part of the deal.
Gross, an Israeli-born entrepreneur who sold his previous startup, Cue, to Apple in 2013 and went on to lead AI projects at the iPhone maker, has long operated at the intersection of cutting-edge research and venture capital. With Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, he has backed dozens of AI startups and helped shape the ecosystem that companies like Meta are now scrambling to dominate.
Meta’s interest in Gross and Friedman comes alongside a sweeping internal AI realignment announced this week. Alexandr Wang, the founder of data-labeling firm Scale AI, which Meta recently bought nearly half of for $14.3 billion, is now the company’s chief AI officer. Gross and Friedman are expected to work closely with Wang as Meta accelerates its ambitions in superintelligence research and commercialization.
For Zuckerberg, the stakes are existential. In a memo to employees, he described superintelligent AI as the beginning of “a new era for humanity” and pledged to invest whatever it takes for Meta to lead the field. The company has spent recent months raiding rivals for talent, hiring engineers and scientists from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic.
At SSI, Sutskever is now formally CEO, with Daniel Levy stepping in as president. Despite high-profile suitors, Sutskever says the startup will remain independent as it continues its bid to build what it calls a safe superintelligent AI. “We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do,” he wrote in his message. “Together we will keep building safe superintelligence.”
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