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The AI Hunger Games Have Begun
PLUS: Zuck’s $300 M hires, Grammarly's Superhuman Acquisition, and Cisco AI Interview
Nathan Lands
July 04, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Welcome to Lore Brief, your weekly edge in the age of AI.
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One-Minute Brief
Sakana AI | Multi-Model Fusion – New AB-MCTS algorithm by Japanese AI lab lets ChatGPT, Gemini 2.5, and DeepSeek “think together,” cracking 30 % of ARC-AGI-2 puzzles vs 23 % for the best solo LLM. Signals an ensemble future for frontier AI.
OpenAI | $30 B Oracle Cloud Pact – Multi-year deal secures massive GPU capacity for GPT-6 and enterprise hosting; Oracle books revenue from 2028.
xAI | $10 B War Chest – Musk raises $5 B equity + $5 B debt, chasing an $80 B valuation to scale Grok and custom silicon.
The AI Hunger Games Have Begun
Meta rewrites the talent market
New division: Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zuckerberg’s bet on artificial super-intelligence.
$14.3 B swing deal: Meta bought a 49 % stake in Scale AI, bringing founder Alexandr Wang in to run MSL.
Superstar hires:
• (Confirmed) Nat Friedman — ex-GitHub CEO, co-founder of Safe Superintelligence (SSI) with OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever.
• (Anticipated) Daniel Gross — SSI co-founder and (until this week) its CEO.The price of admission: Meta is rumored to be paying $100M packages to top AI researchers, with Zucerkberg personally cold-DMing hundreds of frontier researchers on WhatsApp.
Grammarly goes after the operating-system layer
Deal: Acquired email darling Superhuman (last valued $825 M).
Strategic goal: Plug Superhuman into Grammarly’s 40 M daily users and 500 k-app footprint, turning the inbox into an always-on “AI productivity OS.”
Why it matters
From AGI to superintelligence. Frontier labs treat AGI as done; the new finish line is beyond-human capability. Zuckerberg's internal memo: "Developing superintelligence is now in sight."
Talent > tech. Meta's 49% Scale deal shows a cheaper template than buying a frontier model outright—expect more "equity + GPU + cash" swaps.
New operating systems. Email (Grammarly), browsers, and code editors are being rebuilt around agents. Any UI layer you monetize today can be abstracted away tomorrow.
Board-level risk. Vinod Khosla: 80% of Fortune 500 jobs could be automated by 2030, largest turnover since the Industrial Revolution.
By the numbers
$100M+ Meta's typical four-year package for tier-1 researchers
40M daily Grammarly users; >$700M ARR pre-Superhuman
#2 Grammarly's rank on G2's 2025 AI software list, behind ChatGPT
Executive takeaway
Compensation is going up for A players. Eight-figure comp is no longer outlier. In the Age of AI, compensation for top talent is increasing significantly.
Play offense or perish. Record-size acquisitions show the board game is being reset in real time; launching AI-native products (even if they cannibalize legacy revenue) is the only way incumbents avoid becoming footnotes.
• This dwarfs the internet boom. Think of every opportunity you missed in 2000; the upside (and the disruption) arriving this decade is bigger by orders of magnitude.
"In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." — Mark Zuckerberg (quoting Peter Thiel in 2016 interview with Sam Altman)
The Next Wave: What's Actually Coming in AI (From Someone Building It)
Cisco's AI leader reveals how enterprise AI transformation will reshape networking, security, and business operations. → Watch | Listen
Things I’m Learning From
That’s it for today.
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(Disclosure: I may own equity in companies mentioned in Lore Brief.)