The social giant made a takeover bid for the startup earlier this year and tried to recruit chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who rejected both offers, sources told CNBC. Meta is now in discussions to hire Safe Superintelligence (SSI) CEO Daniel Gross and his venture capital partner Nat Friedman, and buy out their fund, sources told The Information. (CNBC, The Information)

Talking point: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally assembling a supergroup of researchers and executives to chase artificial general intelligence (AGI), which would match and then exceed human brainpower. Sutskever, a Canadian computer scientist, left OpenAI and founded his new startup with the goal of reaching AGI in a “straight shot”—SSI doesn’t plan to launch products along the way. Meta, by contrast, has been trying to get AI into as many of its apps and features as possible, shuffling its research teams into the product development organization last year. It reportedly discussed buying AI search firm Perplexity before investing in Scale AI instead.