Meta Acquires PlayAI, a Startup With About 20 Employees
Developing AI Voice Technology for Natural Conversations
Actively Recruiting Talent From ScaleAI, OpenAI, and Others
Meta, which is investing heavily to find new opportunities in the global artificial intelligence (AI) race, has acquired a small AI startup this time. According to Yonhap News on July 12 (local time), citing Bloomberg, "Meta has acquired PlayAI, a startup developing AI voice technology," adding, "With this acquisition, the entire team of the startup will join Meta starting next week."
PlayAI is a startup developing AI voice technology that enables natural, human-like conversations, and it is reported to have around 20 employees. In an internal document, Meta stated, "The work of creating natural voices and building a platform for easy voice production aligns very well with our efforts and roadmap across AI characters, Meta AI, wearables, and audio content creation."
On June 30, Meta announced the establishment of the 'Superintelligence Research Lab' and has been making moves to strengthen its talent pool. Previously, Meta decided to invest $14.3 billion (approximately 19.6 trillion won) in the AI startup ScaleAI and recruited its founder and CEO, Alexander Wang. He will serve as the head of the research lab and Meta's Chief AI Officer (CAIO). Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, has also joined to lead AI product and application research. In addition, Daniel Gross, CEO of Safe Superintelligence (SSI)?an AI startup founded by Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI?has also joined Meta.
According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Meta has offered compensation packages of up to $100 million (about 137 billion won) to recruit a large number of OpenAI researchers. It is also reported that Meta hired Luoming Fang, Apple's head of AI model development, with a compensation package worth $200 million (about 270 billion won). This level of compensation far exceeds Apple's internal standards for all positions except for CEO Tim Cook. As a result, the compensation at Meta's Superintelligence Research Lab is now considered to be among the highest for any corporate position globally, including CEOs of major banks.
The competition among global companies to recruit AI talent is accelerating. OpenAI had attempted to acquire the AI coding startup Windsurf, but the deal fell through. Taking advantage of this, Google hired Windsurf's CEO and key engineers. Windsurf is a software development company that uses AI to assist developers with coding. Google has secured licenses for some of Windsurf's technology and, while it does not hold equity in Windsurf, it is reported to be paying $2.4 billion (about 3.3 trillion won) for this deal.
Last month, there was also news that Apple was considering acquiring the AI startup PerplexityAI, which drew significant attention. Perplexity is a startup well known for its AI-based search engine that competes with Google, the world's largest search engine company. However, these discussions are in the early stages, and it is not yet decided whether they will result in an actual acquisition offer.
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