Meta seems to be operating with a renewed urgency to dominate the AI race as the social media giant has quietly explored acquiring several startups, including video generation firm Runway, in recent weeks.
The Facebook and Instagram parent held talks with Runway over a potential takeover ahead of its announcement about making a multi-billion-dollar investment in data startup Scale AI, according to a report by CNBC.
However, the talks between Meta and Runway did not reportedly reach far. Runway is the developer of various AI video generation tools. News of Meta’s interest in acquiring Runway comes at a time when the big tech company is doubling down on its AI bet.
In June this year, Meta announced it was investing $14.3 billion into Scale AI as part of a deal that placed Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old co-founder of the data labelling startup, at the helm of a newly created artificial superintelligence (ASI) lab. A few Scale AI employees will also be part of Meta’s ASI lab. Meta has also agreed to a 49 per cent stake in Scale AI
Last week, Meta made headlines with news of its interest in acquiring Perplexity AI, a leading AI search startup founded by Indian-origin Arvind Srinivas. Zuckerberg also reportedly attempted to acquire the $32 billion AI startup Safe Superintelligence, which was launched a year ago by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, as well as Thinking Machines, another AI startup founded by OpenAI alumni Mira Murati.
However, both these efforts reportedly fell through with the AI startups opting, instead, for additional funding rounds at higher valuations. Now, Meta is planning to hire former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and his business partner Daniel Gross, who had been leading Safe Superintelligence.
Meta is known for large-scale deals. It has made a number of high-profile acquisitions in the past. For example, photo-sharing platform Instagram or messaging service WhatsApp were both acquired by Meta in highly successful deals that continue to pay dividends today.
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However, Zuckerberg is now reportedly under pressure and must answer to shareholders about how the company plans to win the AI race against OpenAI and Google’s parent company, Alphabet. That could potentially explain why Meta is on a spending spree and actively eyeing AI companies, even though the cost of acquiring them during the peak of the AI boom is astronomically high.
Apple is also rumoured to be interested in buying Perplexity. While traditional search engines like Google (built on crawling, indexing, and ranking) constantly scan and catalog the internet, Perplexity AI takes a different approach. Instead of relying solely on static results, its search engine transforms search into a natural conversation.
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