Meta tried to buy Ilya Sutskever's startup and now plans to hire its CEO.

Mark Zuckerberg has opted to hire the startup's CEO and co-founder, Daniel Gross, after the company rejected a takeover bid.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, wants to lead the race for superintelligent AI, and he wants to do it through multimillion-dollar hires.

Last week, the company announced the hiring of Alexander Wang, CEO of Scale AI, after investing $14.3 billion in his company.

Now, according to The Information, Zuckerberg appears to have set his sights on Daniel Gross, CEO of Ilya Sutskever 's (formerly of OpenAI) startup Safe Superintelligence, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

But the initial deal was going to be different. According to the same outlet, Meta attempted to acquire Safe Superintelligence, valued at $32 billion in a funding round in April. Sutskever, who had been the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI and last year founded his own AI company, SuperIntelligence, rejected the offer as well as the company's attempt to hire him.

After those talks failed, Zuckerberg began negotiating with Gross, according to the sources.

In addition to his position at Safe Superintelligence, Gross runs a venture capital firm with Friedman called NFDG.

According to sources, both executives will join Meta and work on superintelligence products under the direction of Alexander Wang. Meta will also acquire a stake in NFDG.

Also this week, OpenAI's Sam Altman admitted on a podcast that Zuckerberg's company has tried to lure several OpenAI employees by offering them signing bonuses of up to $100 million. According to the OpenAI CEO, "none of our best employees have decided to accept the offer."

The competition among these tech giants to lead generative AI is leading them to invest millions in hiring. OpenAI itself recently announced a deal to sign iPhone designer Jony Ive , paying around $6.5 billion to acquire his AI device startup, io.

Meanwhile, Google has signed the founders of artificial intelligence startup Character.AI, and Microsoft has recruited DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.