Welcome to the TechMeme right home from Monday, July 7th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Catching you up on the great Zuckerberg AI recruitment drive, cluing you in on the great

data center buildout gold rush. That is, again, all about AI. TikTok is about to force everybody

to use a new version of their app,

and are the unicorns coming back? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

So, obviously, I have some things to catch you up on. First up, Daniel Gross officially left

Safe Super Intelligence, the AI startup he co-founded with Ilius Saskerv to join Meta's new

Superintelligence Lab and work on AI products. In fact, I was very wrong about something last week.

It turns out quite a few people have taken up Mark Zuckerberg's

offers of the Money Canon to work on AI at Meta. First link in the show notes is to a semaphore

story that has a list of all of the people that we know of that have signed up so far. I'm not going to

just read you a list of names, but like the creators of 03 and 03 Mini and the recent

image generation models at OpenAI, they're on there, the pre-training tech lead for Gemini is in

there. And quote, meta's new hires offer a glimpse into its nascent superintelligence unit

aimed at making the social media company's AI capabilities more competitive

with industry leaders. The new team holds a wide gamut of skill sets with some specific

expertise in image generation, perception, synthetic data, and reasoning. The resumes suggest

meta is working on the kind of voice and image-supported multimodal models with reasoning capabilities

to more directly take on OpenAI suite of products. The hiring of Pi Sun, who developed two

generations of Waymo's perception models, is particularly interesting. Given meta's investments in

augmented reality headsets and glasses, it points to a continued integration of AI into devices in which

meta could carve out a niche as OpenAI begins its partnership with Johnny Ive and Apple

...