Daniel Gross

Overview

Daniel Gross is a co-founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), the AI company he started with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy, and he served as its chief executive until early July 2025^[1]. He also runs the venture capital firm NFDG together with Nat Friedman^[1].

Building and leading SSI

SiliconANGLE reported on 3 July 2025 that Gross had co-founded SSI the previous year with Sutskever and Levy, both former OpenAI researchers^[1]. At SSI he held the chief executive role, leading the company until the week before that report^[1]. His tenure as CEO therefore covers the period in which the company was set up and took its first shape as an organisation, before leadership passed to his co-founder.

The move to Meta

The same report said Gross would join Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a unit Meta had newly launched^[1]. News that Meta intended to hire him first surfaced in mid-June 2025^[1].

Meta's original plan was believed to be different in kind: an acquisition of SSI as a whole^[1]. SSI had reportedly received a $32 billion valuation in April^[1]. That plan changed after Sutskever rebuffed the offer. Meta then shifted from a takeover to hiring Gross, and Sutskever succeeded Gross as SSI's chief executive^[1]. The sequence matters for how the change is read: the company stayed independent, while its founding chief executive moved to the new lab, and one of its remaining co-founders took over its leadership.

NFDG and the shape of the deal

Gross runs NFDG with Nat Friedman, and the fund holds a stake in SSI^[1]. The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta offered to buy out some of NFDG's limited partners, seeking up to 49% of the fund's holdings^[1].

Buying out limited partners is a specific kind of transaction. A venture fund is typically organised so that outside investors, the limited partners, put in most of the money, while the firm's partners choose and manage the investments. Buying out a limited partner means paying that investor for its share of the fund, rather than buying the companies the fund has invested in. In this case the reported offer concerned the fund's holdings, with Meta seeking up to 49% of them^[1].

What the episode shows

Hiring a founder is not the same thing as buying a company, but the two can end up connected. Here a takeover discussion turned into a hire, and was accompanied by a reported offer aimed at part of the founder's fund holdings^[1]. For readers following how AI labs assemble their teams, the case is a concrete example of how competition for a small number of senior people, and the financial arrangements around them, can become as consequential as the corporate transactions themselves.