The push appears to suggest that Meta is hustling to lock down the race to win the next generation of AI, as the social media company has quietly conducted talks to acquire a variety of startups, spread out over recent weeks, including the Runway video generation company.
The parent of Facebook and Instagram was in discussions with Runway about a potential acquisition before it announced that it was investing billions of dollars in the data start-up Scale AI, CNBC reported.
But discussions between Meta and Runway did not appear to have progressed very far, according to the people. Runway is the creator of a variety of AI-powered video generation tools. The news that Meta hopes to acquire Runway also comes at a time when the big tech company is doubling down on its AI wager.
In June Meta announced it was investing US$14.3b into Scale AI as part of a wider deal that saw Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old co-founder of the data labelling startup.
with a newly formed lab for researching artificial superintelligence (ASI). A handful of Scale AI workers will also be included in Meta’s ASI lab. Meta also agreed to a 49 per cent interest in Scale AI
But last week, Meta came into the limelight as reports surfaced that it is planning to buy the Indian-origin Arvind Srinivas-founded, AI search startup Perplexity AI. Zuckerberg is also said to have tried to buy up the $32 billion AI startup Safe Superintelligence, launched a year ago by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and Thinking Machines, another AI startup founded by OpenAI alums Mira Murati.
But both of the deals have reportedly collapsed, with the AI startups rather deciding to tack a few more rounds onto their startups at higher valuations. Now, Meta is looking to bring on former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and his associate Daniel Gross, who were running Safe Superintelligence.
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Meta is no stranger to big deals. It has done a few major deals in the past. For instance photo-sharing platform Instagram or messaging app WhatsApp, which Meta bought out in highly lucrative deals which continue to yield dividends, today.
But Zuckerberg is now believed to be under pressure, and must report back to the company’s shareholders, on how they intend to win the AI race against OpenAI and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. That might help explain why Meta is on a spending spree and literally chasing AI companies even while the price of purchase has shot up to astronomical levels as part of the second AI gold rush.
Who is Alexandr Wang, and why is Meta betting billions on his startup Scale AI?
Apple itself is also rumoured to be a potential buyer for Perplexity. But instead of crawling the internet like more traditional search engines (such as Google) are built to do (in other words, filtering data through a methodical crawling, indexing and ranking process), Perplexity AI has a completely different approach. Rather than being based purely on static results, its search engine turns search into a natural Conversion
