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Ilya Sutskever becomes CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta poached Daniel Gross

July 3, 2025
05:08 PM
3 min read
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Ilya Sutskever will assume the CEO role at Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup he co-founded after leaving OpenAI.

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investment

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Published

July 3, 2025

05:08 PM

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CNBC

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investmenttechnologyartificial intelligencemarket cyclesseasonal analysismarket

Ilya Sutskever on Thursday said he will assume the CEO role at Safe Superintelligence, the artificial intelligence startup he co-founded

Daniel Gross, a longtime entrepreneur and AI investor who had been acting as company's CEO, left on June 29

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's has been on multibillion-dollar AI hiring spree and poached Gross as part of those efforts

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, speaks at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel, June 5, 2023

Jack Guez | AFP | Getty ImagesOpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever said he will assume the CEO role at Safe Superintelligence, the artificial intelligence startup he launched last year

Sutskever's announcement on Thursday comes after Meta poached Daniel Gross, a longtime entrepreneur and AI investor who had been CEO of Safe Superintelligence

In a post on X, Sutskever said Gross' time at the company has been "winding down," and that his last day was June 29

Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Levy will now serve as president, and the company's nical team will continue to report to Sutskever, he said

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a multibillion-dollar AI hiring spree, highlighted by a $14 billion investment in Scale AI that brought the startup's founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his lead engineers to Meta

Zuckerberg announced a new organization on Monday called Meta Superintelligence Labs that's made up of top AI reers and engineers

However, Gross' name was not listed among the new hires mentioned by Zuckerberg

Gross did not respond to CNBC's request for

During Zuckerberg's AI hiring blitz, Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, but Sutskever rebuffed those efforts, CNBC previously reported

Safe Superintelligence was reportedly valued at $32 billion in a fundraising round in April

Sutskever confirmed his plans on Thursday to keep running the company as an independent organization. "⁠You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us

We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through," Sutskever wrote. "We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do

Together we will keep building safe superintelligence. "Sutskever previously served as OpenAI's chief scientist and co-led the company's Superalignment team with Jan Leike, who left to join rival AI firm Anthropic

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