July 3 (Reuters) - Ilya Sutskever has taken over the

reins of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the artificial

intelligence startup he launched last year, after losing CEO

Daniel Gross to an intensifying talent war in the industry.

Gross has joined Meta Platforms ( META ) to lead its AI

products division, sources told Reuters.

The development comes as tech giants such as Meta Platforms ( META )

aggressively chase high-profile acquisitions and offer

multi-million-dollar pay packages to attract top talent in the

race to lead the next wave of artificial intelligence.

Meta had also attempted to recruit Ilya Sutskever and

acquire SSI, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

"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 said in a post on X. SSI

raised $1 billion in cash last year to build advanced AI systems

designed to safely exceed human intelligence.

Gross did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for

comment.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched a new division, Meta

Superintelligence Labs, to unify the company's AI efforts,

following setbacks with its Llama 4 model and key staff

departures.

The unit will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang

and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman, after Meta invested $14.3

billion in Scale and ramped up efforts to recruit top AI talent.

Gross and Friedman are known to be close, having co-founded

the venture capital firm NFDG - named after their initials. The

firm has backed high-profile startups including Safe

Superintelligence, Perplexity and Figma.

Apple acquired Gross's startup, Cue, in 2013 for its

predictive search and AI technology, after which Gross joined

the iPhone maker as a director, overseeing machine learning and

artificial intelligence.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Krystal Hu in New

York; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)