Zuckerberg Fills Out His AI Dream Team; Developers Are Cheating on LMArena

Before we get to today’s column, my colleagues Kalley and Cory broke some important news on Wednesday: Meta Platforms is close to hiring former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who now moonlights as a prominent AI investor, and Daniel Gross, Friedman’s investment partner and a cofounder of Safe Superintelligence with Ilya Sutskever. 

In the process, Meta is partly buying out the investors’ AI-focused venture fund, which is named after them, and could be paying more than $1 billion for the privilege. In any case, Meta will now own a piece of rivals like SSI, ElevenLabs, Pika and Perplexity, though it won’t have information rights so the founders of those firms can maybe rest a little easier.

It comes just a week after Meta said it would invest a mind-boggling sum of $14.3 billion in data labeling firm Scale AI in order to hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang in what is the most expensive acquihire of all time.

It seems like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking recruiting into his own hands after Llama 4’s rocky debut and forming his AI dream team to hopefully do what his existing team couldn’t. So don’t be surprised to see him do even more deals after these ones.