Meta Platforms Inc. is reportedly looking to expand its artificial intelligence team with yet another high-profile tech industry luminary: former GitHub Chief Executive Nat Friedman.
The parent company of Facebook is also said to be angling to bring aboard Daniel Gross, who is Friedman’s partner in the AI-focused venture capital fund NFDG.
The discussions were first reported by The Information, which cites anonymous sources familiar with the matter as saying Meta also wants to purchase a stake in the investment firm, which has backed a number of well-known AI startups.
Friedman (pictured) is a big name in Silicon Valley circles, having been handed the CEO role at GitHub some time after the company was acquired by Microsoft Corp. for $7.5 billion in June 2018. The then-Microsoft corporate vice president took over as GitHub’s leader in October 2019, and led the company for just over two years, during which time he helped to grow its value to an estimated $16.5 billion.
During his tenure, Friedman helped to establish GitHub as a pioneer in AI with the launch of GitHub Copilot, which is one of the earliest and most successful coding assistants, leveraging generative AI to complete lines of code and make suggestions for programmers. He departed GitHub in November 2021 to focus on investments at NFDG.
As for Gross, he co-founded a personal assistant app called Cue, before joining Apple Inc. in 2013 after the iPhone maker acquired the startup for about $50 million. At Apple, he worked on a number of AI projects, before leaving to co-found the developer tooling startup Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Friedman and Gross have worked together at NFDG for some years already, where they focus on identifying hot AI startups and investing anywhere between $1 million to $100 million in seed and growth rounds. NFDG has backed some notable companies over the years, including the payments firm Stripe Inc., the generative AI chatbot builder Character Technologies Inc., the machine learning operations company Weights and Biases Inc. and the AI search engine firm Perplexity AI Inc.
The Information didn’t specify in its report exactly what Friedman and Gross would be doing at Meta. But Reuters reports that the former GitHub boss is currently a member of the company’s Advisory Group, which is an external advisory council that was established to give it independent guidance and technology and product development.
In recent weeks, Meta has been scrambling to sign up more talent in an effort to bolster its flagging efforts in the AI industry. The company has invested billions of dollars into research and development in an attempt to keep pace with the likes of OpenAI and Google.
Although it has had success with its open-source Llama LLM models, few people have described Meta as being ahead of its rivals. Its latest Llama models have only had a lukewarm reception, and it has reportedly come unstuck in its efforts to improve on them.
Last week, Meta paid a reported $14.3 billion to acquire the AI training startup Scale AI Inc., in a deal which also secured the services of its former CEO Alexandr Wang. The company reportedly targeted Wang specifically to lead its new AI research lab, which is focused on developing “artificial general intelligence” that can match or surpass the capabilities of humans.
Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Meta’s interest in Friedman suggests that it’s looking to take on a much broader role in terms of AI development.
“Meta is repositioning its AI strategy, and the Scale AI acquisition gives it more of an operational role, which it hasn’t really done in the past. “Previously, Meta’s AI strategy was all about delivering increasingly powerful Llama models, but the interest in the former GitHub CEO signals a growing interest in the builder community and traditional developers.”
Meta has also been trying to poach top AI talent from companies including OpenAI and Google LLC’s DeepMind, offering compensation packages that include $100 million signing bonuses.
That’s according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said Meta made such an offer to one of its chief researchers, Noam Brown, only to be turned down.
“[Meta has] started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Altman said in a podcast this week. “You know, like, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in] compensation per year […] I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.”
Altman speculated that his employees turned down Meta because they believe that his company has a better chance of achieving AGI first, and will one day become much more valuable than the social media giant.
Photo: Stripe/YouTube
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