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Meta Held Talks To Buy Thinking Machines, Perplexity, And Safe Superintelligence
Tech /Command LineMeta held talks to buy Thinking Machines, Perplexity, and Safe SuperintelligenceMark Zuckerberg has been playing the field as he looks to reboot his AI strategy.
Mark Zuckerberg has been playing the field as he looks to reboot his AI strategy.
by Alex HeathJun 20, 2025, 10:53 PM UTCLinkFacebookThreads
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
Alex Heath is a deputy editor and author of the Command Line newsletter. He has been reporting on the tech industry for more than a decade.At this point, it's becoming easier to say which AI startups Mark Zuckerberg hasn't looked at acquiring.
In addition to Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence (SSI), sources tell me the Meta CEO recently discussed buying ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab and Perplexity, the AI-native Google rival. None of these talks progressed to the formal offer stage for various reasons, including disagreements over deal prices and strategy, but together they illustrate how aggressively Zuckerberg has been canvassing the industry to reboot his AI efforts.
Now, details about the team Zuckerberg is assembling are starting to come into view: SSI co-founder and CEO Daniel Gross, along with ex-Github CEO Nat Friedman, are poised to co-lead the Meta AI assistant. Both men will report to Alexandr Wang, the former Scale CEO Zuckerberg just paid over $14 billion to quickly hire. Wang told his Scale team goodbye last Friday and was in the Meta office on Monday. This week, he has been meeting with top Meta leaders (more on that below) and continuing to recruit for the new AI team Zuckerberg has tasked him with building. I expect the team to be unveiled as soon as next week.
Rather than join Meta, Sutskever, Murati, and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas have all gone on to raise more money at higher valuations. Sutskever, a titan of the AI research community who co-founded OpenAI, recently raised a couple of billion dollars for SSI. Both Meta and Google are investors in his company, I'm told. Murati also just raised a couple of billion dollars. Neither she nor Sutskever is close to releasing a product. Srinivas, meanwhile, is in the process of raising around $500 million for Perplexity.
Spokespeople for all the companies involved either declined to comment or didn't respond in time for publication. The Information and CNBC first reported Zuckerberg's talks with Safe Superintelligence, while Bloomberg first reported the Perplexity talks.
While Zuckerberg's recruiting drive is motivated by the urgency he feels to fix Meta's AI strategy, the situation also highlights the fierce competition for top AI talent these days. In my conversations this week, those on the inside of the industry aren't surprised by Zuckerberg making nine-figure — or even, yes, 10-figure — compensation offers for the best AI talent. There are certain senior people at OpenAI, for example, who are already compensated in that ballpark, thanks to the company's meteoric increase in valuation over the last few years.
Speaking of OpenAI, it's clear that CEO Sam Altman is at least a bit rattled by Zuckerberg's hiring spree. His decision to appear on his brother's podcast this week and say that "none of our best people" are leaving for Meta was probably meant to convey a position of strength, but in reality, it looks like he is throwing his former colleagues under the bus. I was confused by Altman's suggestion that Meta paying a lot upfront for talent won't "set up a great culture." After all, didn't OpenAI just pay $6.5 billion to hire Jony Ive and his small hardware team?
Alex Himel."We think that glasses are the best form factor for AI"When I joined a Zoom call with Alex Himel, Meta's VP of wearables, this week, he had just gotten off a call with Zuckerberg's new AI chief, Alexandr Wang.
"There's an increasing number of Alexes that I talk to on a regular basis," Himel joked as we started our conversation about Meta's new glasses release with Oakley. "I was just in my first meeting with him. There were like three people in a room with the camera real far away, and I was like, 'Who is talking right now?' And then I was like, 'Oh, hey, it's Alex.'"
The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity:
How did your meeting with Alex just now go?
The meeting was about how to make AI as awesome as it can be for glasses. Obviously, there are some unique use cases in the glasses that aren't stuff you do on a phone. The thing we're trying to figure out is how to balance it all, because AI can be everything to everyone or it could be amazing for more specific use cases.
We're trying to figure out how to strike the right balance because there's a ton of stuff in the underlying Llama models and that whole pipeline that we don't care about on glasses. Then there's stuff we really, really care about, like egocentric view and trying to feed video into the models to help with some of the really aspirational use cases that we wouldn't build otherwise.
You are referring to this new lineup with Oakley as "AI glasses." Is that the new branding for this category? They are AI glasses, not smart glasses?
We refer to the category as AI glasses. You saw Orion. You used it for longer than anyone else in the demo, which I commend you for. We used to think that's what you needed to hit scale for this new category. You needed the big field of view and display to overlay virtual content. Our opinion of that has definitely changed. We think we can hit scale faster, and AI is the reason we think that's possible.
Right now, the top two use cases for the glasses are audio — phone calls, music, podcasts — and taking photos and videos. We look at participation rates of our active users, and those have been one and two since launch. Audio is one. A very close second is photos and videos.
AI has been number three from the start. As we've been launching more markets — we're now in 18 — and we've been adding more features, AI is creeping up. Our biggest investment by a mile on the software side is AI functionality, because we think that glasses are the best form factor for AI. They are something you're already wearing all the time. They can see what you see. They can hear what you hear. They're super accessible.
Is your goal to have AI supersede audio and photo to be the most used feature for glasses, or is that not how you think about it?
From a math standpoint, at best, you could tie. We do want AI to be something that's increasingly used by more people more frequently. We think there's definitely room for the audio to get better. There's definitely room for image quality to get better. The AI stuff has much more headroom.
How much of the AI is onboard the glasses versus the cloud? I imagine you have lots of physical constraints with this kind of device.
We've now got one billion-parameter models that can run on the frame. So, increasingly, there's stuff there. Then we have stuff running on the phone.
If you were watching WWDC, Apple made a couple of announcements that we haven't had a chance to test yet, but we're excited about. One is the Wi-Fi Aware APIs. We should be able to transfer photos and videos without having people tap that annoying dialogue box every time. That'd be great. The second one was processor background access, which should allow us to do image processing when you transfer the media over. Syncing would work just like it does on Android.
Do you think the market for these new Oakley glasses will be as big as the Ray-Bans? Or is it more niche because they are more outdoors and athlete-focused?
We work with EssilorLuxottica, which is a great partner. Ray-Ban is their largest brand. Within that, the most popular style is Wayfair. When we launched the original Ray-Ban Meta glasses, we went with the most popular style for the most popular brand.
Their second biggest brand is Oakley. A lot of people wear them. The Holbrook is really popular. The HSTN, which is what we're launching, is a really popular analog frame. We increasingly see people using the Ray-Ban Meta glasses for active use cases. This is our first step into the performance category. There's more to come.
What's your reaction to Google's announcements at I/O for their XR glasses platform and eyewear partnerships?
We've been working with EssilorLuxottica for like five years now. That's a long time for a partnership. It takes a while to get really in sync. I feel very good about the state of our partnership. We're able to work quickly. The Oakley Meta glasses are the fastest program we've had by quite a bit. It took less than nine months.
I thought the demos they [Google] did were pretty good. I thought some of those were pretty compelling. They didn't announce a product, so I can't react specifically to what they're doing. It's flattering that people see the traction we're getting and want to jump in as well.
On the AR glasses front, what have you been learning from Orion now that you've been showing it to the outside world?
We've been going full speed on that. We've actually hit some pretty good internal milestones for the next version of it, which is the one we plan to sell. The biggest learning from using them is that we feel increasingly good about the input and interaction model with eye tracking and the neural band. I wore mine during March Madness in the office. I was literally watching the games. Picture yourself sitting at a table with a virtual TV just above people's heads. It was amazing.
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Open this photo in gallery:Co-founder Jason Smith says the coming layoffs could affect up to 50 per cent of the company.NELSON MOUELLIC/Supplied
Vancouver software company Klue Labs Inc. is preparing to lay off up to half its work force, or about 100 people, to reposition itself for the artificial intelligence age.
Co-founder and chief executive Jason Smith told The Globe and Mail that he informed staff about the restructuring last week and said that Klue is finalizing plans for layoffs to be implemented this coming Wednesday.
"We need to do this because it's a wake-up call for companies that aren't AI native to start to think that way," he said, adding that the restructuring is not because of financial concerns or a lack of funding.
While the number of layoffs could change, Mr. Smith said that it could affect between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of the company.
Klue, which makes AI-powered business intelligence tools for sales professionals to gather information on competitors, has to reboot as a result of AI, according to Mr. Smith. Generative AI tools have become more adept since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, forcing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies founded before that date to drastically rethink operations, he said.
Your brain on AI
Klue has already adopted AI to a large extent internally, but Mr. Smith felt that the company was not moving fast enough. After an employee responsible for writing help documentation left Klue recently, Mr. Smith realized that AI could handle much of the work before the company would need to hire a replacement.
"That became a pivotal moment for me to think that we need to do something more dramatic than inching our way to AI improvement," he said. "My belief is you kind of need to shock the company."
Klue was founded in 2015 and has raised US$80-million in funding, including from Tiger Global Management, and services customers such as Autodesk and Salesforce. Its platform uses AI to analyze millions of data points, including news articles and websites, to deliver insights to customers about the competition.
The impact of AI on the labour market is hotly debated and uncertain. Some executives, such as Anthropic's Dario Amodei, have argued that AI could replace large swaths of entry-level office jobs. Others contend that AI will change the nature of work but allow people to focus on higher-value tasks, while also creating new roles.
Announcing layoffs beforehand was unusual, he acknowledged, but said he did so in order for employees to have time to process the news and ask questions and decide if they want to leave voluntarily. The company is offering voluntary exit packages to all employees with the same severance as involuntary layoffs.
Mr. Smith said the downsizing is not about replacing employees directly but equipping smaller teams to work faster and more efficiently with AI, particularly with agents, which are tools that complete a range of multi-step tasks such as coding and developing software prototypes. "This is about creating a reduction, so you can't turn to an automatic hire. You have to turn to see if an AI agent can help you first," he said.
A seasoned tech executive and entrepreneur, Mr. Smith said that if he were to start Klue today, he would begin with using AI agents and grow from there.
Klue is the latest Canadian company reckoning with the impact of AI. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told employees in April that using AI is a "fundamental expectation" and that before asking for more headcount or resources, employees will have to justify why the work cannot be done with AI.
Open Text Corp. Has adopted an AI-first approach, too. "We will only hire new talent where the work cannot be done by AI," CEO Mark Barrenechea said on a May earnings call.
In the U.S., Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo on Tuesday that adopting generative AI and agents "will reduce our total corporate workforce" in the next few years.
But at least one company is backtracking. Klarna, which is based in Sweden and offers buy-now-pay-later services, made headlines last year for its attempts to cut its work force in half, implementing a hiring freeze and replacing customer support agents with AI. The company is recruiting again.
Mr. Smith said that could be a possibility for Klue. "If we need to, we can ramp back up," he said. "I want my company on the edge of knowing what it can and can't do. If you don't live on that edge, you're not moving fast enough."
With reports from Sean Silcoff
Rebooting Tech Talent In The Race For AI
VALENCIA COMMUNITY OF VALENCIA, SPAIN - DreamHack (Photo By Rober Solsona/Europa Press via Getty ... More Images)
Europa Press via Getty ImagesAs artificial intelligence (AI) continues to dominate headlines, business leaders stand at a crossroads: They must recruit and retain the cutting-edge talent required to accelerate the adoption of AI while managing through a perplexing smorgasbord of economic uncertainties that have led to unprecedented workforce reductions in the tech sector.
According to Layoffs.Fyi, approximately 1,000 tech companies fired over 164,000 people in 2022 and 193,000 (so far) in 2023—with Accenture, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft each announcing over 10,000 layoffs at a time.
Whether your company is experiencing tech layoffs or talent shortages, believe it or not, attrition remains high for most employers, inflating in-house recruiting costs and blocking businesses from advancing long-planned digital transformation and IT initiatives.
What does this have to do with AI?
In this seemingly paradoxical market, beyond all the layoffs, CEO's are struggling to balance today's growing demand for AI skills with longer-term business growth needs. They are learning that it's time to reboot their thinking around innovation strategies—starting with people. Smart leaders should be thinking about how to channel these disruptive dynamics into their talent strategies, just as they've been doing with technology strategies for several years.
I recently spoke with Jim Kavanaugh, co-founder and CEO of $17B technology solutions provider World Wide Technology (WWT), about what a dynamic talent strategy should look like in today's race to AI. For him, that strategy comes down to two things: Scalability and Culture.
Talent Culture
"People should never be a numbers game," he said. "In the face of rapid technology advancements and shifting economics, we're seeing customers need the ability to insert the right talent in the right place at the right time to help them manage the bottom line while staying on pace with change."
Kavanaugh likened the current talent landscape as a perfect storm, in which "the race for tech talent is intensifying and forcing businesses to find more agile talent strategies that help fend off complacency and allow them to evolve AI strategies at the rapid rate required to compete and succeed."
One estimate predicts nearly 150 million new IT jobs are expected to be created over the next few years as organizations modernize IT infrastructure, shift the division of labor between humans and machines, and adopt a more automated, data-driven way of doing business.
People Platform Passion
Managers can learn a lot from hybrid-leaders who can authentically balance what I think are key organizational assets—people (the who), platform (the what), and passion (the why)—when building organizations, or just driving growth, innovation and change.
Kavanaugh's perspective appears to be informed by his experiences as both a large enterprise using technology and as a market leader deploying and supporting it for global clients. Over the past 33 years, he grew WWT by helping enterprises accelerate digital transformation strategies through strategic IT consulting and execution services, in partnership with some of the world's most advanced hardware and software providers. His hybrid-ness most likely came from his early-days, when he was an Olympic and professional soccer player, where he observed firsthand the power of perseverance, drive, and teamwork. He seems to still be applying those qualities building WWT's award-winning workplace with people and partners that perform.
Cracking The Code
AI is all the rage in business and social circles—but there is more to it if you want to make a sustainably systemic impact on your business. The rub for AI is that it's a technology that needs to be interoperable with a wide range of cloud, DevOps, automation, security and customer experience platforms to fully realize its potential in driving business outcomes. You can't have one without the other.
"This means organizations need people with specialized, high-end technical skill sets, but they also need employees with a solid understanding of how those skills integrate with the company's technology strategy to drive long-term business goals," he explained.
Cracking this code means leaders need to examine their current talent base against specialty skills, like AI, and then determine whether the organization has the time, resources and drive to pursue training and upskilling as it works to fill urgent gaps.
Recruiting The AI Workforce
We are seeing early signs of AI's uncertain impact in the recruiting of the next generation of engineers, developers and designers at top tech companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Juniper. In a recent survey, Juniper found that despite growing dependence on AI, IT leaders do not see AI replacing humans, but rather allowing employees to save time and focus on more unique, nuanced tasks.
Juniper's CEO, Rami Rahim, says, "AI is this new breed of learning – not learning through programming algorithms, it's learning by looking at patterns in data and connecting it to our industry. AI is incredibly promising, it gives our customers the ability to collect data in real time. As an industry we are sitting on a goldmine of information that today is largely untapped."
Smart engineers and developers are starting to immerse themselves in AI tools like CodeGPT, Bugasura, GitHub and Repli to augment their skills, while designers are experimenting with platforms like PiggyAI, Galileo and Viesus to not just upskill and stay relevant—but to become an accelerator of growth in their next gig.
Amazon, an early quiet mover in the space, when commenting on recruiting talent to develop chat interfaces using natural language AI systems stated, "We are significantly investing in generative AI across all of our businesses." On the recruiting front, AI is already creeping into Amazon job postings, as they reboot their recruitment of engineers with skill sets to create "an interactive conversational experience" that may better communicate with shoppers in this transformational era of search.
Scaling An AI Culture
Culture is also a key piece of the puzzle, especially for high-end, in-demand talent with AI skills. In the talent race, attracting the right people at the right time is only half the solution. Keeping your people engaged and motivated is vital to ensuring your organization can innovate and adapt in the months, years, even decades ahead, and this means carefully evaluating your values and standards against the need for speed. Many leaders admit, economic pressures aside, that their need for speed led to over-hiring at most of the tech and other companies that are now laying off.
Considering top talent rarely stays on the market for longer than 10 days (even as the average IT/design job takes more than 50 days to fill), Kavanaugh urges leaders to look beyond traditional staffing agencies and high-profile consultants to close urgent talent gaps for new technologies such as AI. This is going to be tough for some leaders during the next upswing, especially as gig economy practices continue to drive hiring preferences by potential in demand employees.
"No time is ever without change, and you need to be on your toes," he said. "Companies that weren't around 10 years ago are now leading the charge, and you need a talent strategy that's as flexible and agile as your technology strategy. Business won't wait."
And it's because the pace of business won't wait that strategic resourcing solutions require a much closer look. Strategically uniting your tech talent resourcing with those who know and understand your long and short-term IT vision can help position and pivot your organization as dictated by the evolutions of AI and your increasingly competitive business landscape.
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