OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has formally assumed the chief executive role at Safe Superintelligence Inc., the artificial-intelligence start-up he launched last year. Sutskever had been chief scientist and co-chair of the board; he will now also oversee day-to-day operations while continuing to lead the company’s technical work. Co-founder Daniel Levy moves into the newly created position of president. The leadership change follows the departure of co-founder and former CEO Daniel Gross, who is joining Meta Platforms to help build its newly announced Meta Superintelligence Labs. People familiar with the matter said Meta had earlier tried to hire Sutskever and even explored acquiring SSI outright. The start-up was valued at about $32 billion in an April financing that brought in $1 billion in cash. Gross’s move underscores an escalating talent war among big technology companies racing to develop advanced AI. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has poured billions of dollars into recruiting high-profile researchers, recently tapping former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to run the new lab. Sutskever said SSI will remain independent and focused solely on building “safe superintelligence,” rejecting takeover overtures as the competition for scarce expertise intensifies.