Meta wanted to buy a $30 billion AI startup: report. What it is trying instead.

Meta looked to buy Safe Superintelligence earlier this year but was rebuffed by its founder Ilya Sutskever, CNBC reported late Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. Safe Superintelligence was valued at $30 billion in a funding round in March.

Meta and Safe Superintelligence didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

On the face of it, such an acquisition would have been an odd move. Safe Superintelligence hasn’t released any products, as it concentrates on developing supersmart AI. Meta has also been getting along perfectly well on its own, with its stock up 19% so far this year.

The real attraction of such a deal likely would have been to get Sutskever and his key employees on board.

Sutskever was previously chief scientist at OpenAI, where he helped develop the technology behind ChatGPT. He left OpenAI last year following a break with its CEO Sam Altman, and subsequently launched Safe Superintelligence.

Thwarted in his efforts to bring Sutskever on board, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has instead negotiated to recruit Safe Superintelligence’s CEO Daniel Gross, as well as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, according to CNBC. Gross and Friedman are partners in the investment fund NFDG, which has backed several AI start-ups.

So far, Meta has relied on in-house AI models, as opposed to acquiring or funding an AI start-up as Microsoft has done with OpenAI and Amazon.com has with Anthropic. However, there have been signs that Zuckerberg feels Meta’s AI team needs bolstering.

Last week, Meta completed an investment in Scale AI. The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta would pump $14 billion into the data-labeling company in exchange for a 49% stake and that Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang would join Meta.

The bigger picture here is that multiple AI companies have delayed the releases of their next flagship models amid concerns they don’t show sufficient improvement. That suggests the industry’s “scaling law,” the idea that larger and more complex models are automatically more intelligent, is breaking down.

Meta is among those struggling to make a breakthrough. Its “Behemoth” model, originally meant to be released in April, is being delayed until fall or later, according to the Journal.

The response from AI companies has been the development of so-called reasoning models that break down problems step-by-step. However, a recent paper from researchers at Apple found “fundamental limitations” in such models. At tasks beyond a certain level of complexity, these AIs suffered “complete accuracy collapse,” according to the researchers.

That suggests the industry will need to adopt new techniques to push AI to the next level of intelligence. Meta will hope that its new recruits can get there first.