Meta is ramping up its investment in artificial intelligence by going after some of the most talked-about startups and people in the space. Reports say CEO Mark Zuckerberg has approached several AI companies for potential acquisitions, including Perplexity AI, Runway, Thinking Machines (co-founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati), and Safe Superintelligence (SSI), started by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
Meta has also looked at NFDG, a venture fund led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, both of whom helped build SSI.
Meta has tried to recruit directly from OpenAI, reportedly offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million. CTO Andrew Bosworth confirmed the bidding war in an interview with CNBC, saying OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been resisting his competitor’s moves. “The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive,” he said.
Most of the startups have turned Meta down, but Zuckerberg did close one deal – buying a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.3 billion. The company’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, will join Meta to lead its superintelligence work. Meta will also take a partial stake in NFDG, bringing both Friedman and Gross on board under Wang’s leadership.
The moves come as Meta looks to accelerate its AI work, especially around the Llama language models. Reports suggest Zuckerberg has been frustrated by its slower-than-expected progress. Meta already has key AI figures like Yann LeCun and its own research group, FAIR, but it’s not clear yet how this new team will work with them. Wang, who dropped out of MIT, co-founded Scale AI to provide curated training data for machine learning models.
The hiring spree is happening at a time when tech companies are scrambling to bring in top AI talent. Meta now finds itself competing with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Anthropic for a limited pool of experts. At the same time, Meta is working to expand how AI fits into its apps – powering things like Instagram recommendations and chatbots on WhatsApp. Meta is also testing how AI agents could support customer service and online shopping.
How this could change marketing
Meta’s push into AI might start with infrastructure and talent, but it’s likely to affect marketers soon. With Scale AI’s tools and expertise from companies like SSI and Runway, Meta could soon build smarter systems that know how to respond to users in real time. That could lead to quicker ways of creating custom content – like videos and copy that match user interests or behaviour. A stronger backend could also mean better targeting, more relevant ads, and fewer guesswork-driven campaigns.
If Meta continues down this path, marketers might spend less time adjusting campaigns and more time scaling what works.
What this means for marketers
Meta’s new hires and focus on AI suggest changes are coming, affecting how campaigns are planned, created, and delivered. Tools that handle creative work, personalise messages, and connect content with user data may arrive sooner than expected.
That could make it easier for teams to launch campaigns but harder to move off Meta’s tools once they’ve committed to the platform’s tooling. Marketing teams should keep an eye on what features roll out next – because this behind-the-scenes shift may soon shape how everyday marketing gets done.
(Photo by Julio Lopez)
See also: Why marketers are rethinking SEO, ad buying, and data use
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