Author: Qian Cheng, Editor: Xin Yuan
Recently, OpenAI has been aggressively poaching talent, much to the chagrin of Elon Musk.
Musk took to the social platform X to publicly reveal that OpenAI has been actively recruiting engineers from Tesla with lucrative offers, even attempting to lure Ethan Knight, Tesla's former Head of Computer Vision. Fortunately, Musk's own AI company, xAI, acted swiftly and successfully intercepted these attempts by OpenAI.
It's no wonder OpenAI is feeling the pressure. As Musk put it, the competition for AI talent in Silicon Valley has reached a "crazy" level.
Even for OpenAI, a powerhouse in the AI industry, staying competitive goes beyond technological prowess alone. According to statistics from Zhi Dongxi, at least 36 people have left OpenAI, with 31 choosing the entrepreneurial path. The companies founded by these former OpenAI employees have collectively raised over $9 billion, approximately ¥64.793 billion.
Among them, xAI, founded by Musk after years of contention with OpenAI, has open-sourced its flagship model, Grok-1, officially declaring war on OpenAI. Another formidable competitor is Anthropic, a large-model startup founded by former OpenAI Vice President of Research, Dario Amodei, along with a team of over ten colleagues, valued at over $18 billion. Margaret Jennings, a former research scientist at OpenAI, has established Perplexity, an AI search engine startup, with investments from prominent figures such as Amazon's Bezos and Nvidia. Looking at the investor lineup, these startups have already attracted attention from top-tier venture capital players like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Y Combinator, as well as industry giants like Nvidia and Microsoft. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself is listed among the investors.
Aside from venturing into entrepreneurship, five employees have yet to disclose their latest career moves, possibly joining other AI startups or independent research institutions.
One thing is certain: the 36 employees who departed from OpenAI have emerged as dark horses in the tech industry.
One, "Rebuilding" OpenAI? It Has Become a Powerful Competitor
One of the most notable directions taken by departing employees is the realm of large-scale models, with several startups transforming into formidable rivals of OpenAI.
Among these departing employees is a prominent figure, Andrej Karpathy. He was one of the founding members of OpenAI and served as a research scientist from 2015 to 2017. He then moved on to lead the computer vision team for autonomous driving at Tesla. With the release of a series of cutting-edge AI advancements from OpenAI, including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, in February 2023, Karpathy returned to this hottest company in the AI field.
In February this year, Andrej Karpathy made another departure from OpenAI and announced his latest endeavors on Twitter. First, he unveiled a new project called minbpe on GitHub, aimed at creating minimal, clean, and educational code for the widely used Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm in large language model tokenization. The project quickly gained popularity, with its star count surpassing 1,000 in just a day and now reaching 7.6k stars. Following this, he began teaching a course, spanning 2 hours and 13 minutes, guiding students through the process of building a GPT Tokenizer from scratch.
In 2021, Dario Amodei, then the former Vice President of Research at OpenAI, led a team of over ten individuals, including his sister Daniela Amodei, to establish Anthropic. Just last month, they shook the realm of large-scale models by unveiling the Claude 3 series, which dethroned GPT-4, emerging as a creation from this innovative startup.
The Claude 3 series outperforms GPT-4 in multiple performance benchmarks and can handle tasks such as image recognition, chart analysis, and technical drawing interpretation, with a context window of up to 200,000 tokens.
The company has raised a total of $7.3 billion in funding, with investments from Google, Zoom, and Salesforce, making it a highly sought-after investment target following OpenAI's success.
Another notable former OpenAI employee is Tesla's founder and CEO, Elon Musk. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 due to conflicts of interest with his involvement in other ventures alongside Altman and others. He has harbored deep resentment towards OpenAI's shift towards commercialization and closed-source models over the years and has now filed a lawsuit against OpenAI.
Last July, Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, established the AI startup xAI. Just four months later, they launched Grok, a chatbot capable of real-time data retrieval from social platform X, but it was exclusively available to paying users. Grok is built upon the Grok-1 large model, which was trained on top of the prototype Grok-0 base model with 330 billion parameters. In mid-March this year, Musk announced the official open-sourcing of Grok-1, which boasts a staggering 3.14 trillion parameters.
Notably, within the xAI team are Kyle Kosic and Igor Babuschkin, both of whom have previously served as researchers and technical personnel at OpenAI.
Kyle Kosic (left) and Igor Babuschkin (right) (Image Source: LinkedIn)
In terms of funding, xAI has not disclosed the specific amount of financing so far, but in December of last year, documents on the website of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed that xAI had submitted an application to raise $1 billion through equity financing. The company has raised nearly $135 million from four investors.
Apart from the aforementioned star players, the relatively less-known startup Adept made headlines last year by becoming a new unicorn. Backed by top-tier investors like Greylock and industry giants Microsoft and Nvidia, Adept has amassed over $400 million in total funding.
David Luan, former VP of Engineering at OpenAI, teamed up with the co-authors of the Transformer paper, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, to found Adept. Together, they developed the large-scale model ACT-1, which can perform step-by-step operations on computers based on user commands, including using everyday office software like Excel, Salesforce, and Figma.
To be more specific, all you need to do is input a command into the text box, such as "create an Excel spreadsheet" or "edit an image with Photoshop," and the AI will automatically complete the task for you.
These former luminaries from OpenAI have become key figures in the large model industry today, with every move they make guiding the nerves of the entire AI industry and poised to create startups that rival OpenAI.
In addition to the foundational research and development of large models, many employees who have left OpenAI have set their sights on AI+ industry applications. While delving deep into technology, they are combining AI with the needs of different industries or users.
From the main business and products of these startups, they can mainly be divided into three categories: consumer AI applications, enterprise AI application platforms, and robotics solutions.
Former OpenAI research scientist Aravind Srinivas founded the AI search engine startup Perplexity in 2022, proclaiming a challenge to the dominance of search engine giant Google. The main difference between its product and Google Search is that instead of providing a few links after users ask a question, the search interface provides complete answers based on existing links.
▲ Aravind Srinivas (Image source: X)
Established less than two years ago, this product secured $100 million in funding, pushing its valuation to $520 million (approximately 3.724 billion RMB). The latest round of funding also included prominent investors such as Amazon founder Bezos and Nvidia. According to The Wall Street Journal's report last month, Perplexity is on the verge of finalizing a new funding deal with a valuation of around $1 billion, propelling it to unicorn status.
In early 2021, Ludwig Petterson, former designer at OpenAI, developed Quill, an instant messaging app tailored for office scenarios.
This tool facilitates employee chat, channel creation, integration with other applications, and video and voice calls. However, after a series of updates introducing features like uploading custom emojis and adding multiple email accounts, Quill was acquired by Twitter at the end of December 2021, as announced on its official Twitter account.
It's worth mentioning that when Quill was just an idea in Petterson's mind, he secured a $2 million seed investment from investors like Altman.
Tim Shi, a former technical staff member at OpenAI, has been involved in several projects including open-domain platform World of Bits and measuring and training AI intelligence levels in games through OpenAI Universe.
In 2017, after departing from OpenAI, Tim Shi founded Cresta AI, an intelligent customer service platform. Utilizing technologies like generative AI, Cresta AI offers real-time conversation guidance for sales and customer service, providing end-to-end AI assistance. The company's clientele includes globally recognized names such as Hilton, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, and Porsche. Cresta AI has secured $151 million in funding, with a valuation reaching $1.6 billion.
Gantry, founded by former OpenAI research scientist Josh Tobin and OpenAI's founding engineer and infrastructure lead Vicki Cheung, specializes in assisting businesses in deploying AI systems to enhance the security of large-scale AI implementations. The startup has raised $28.3 million in funding.
Josh Tobin (left) and Vicki Cheung (right) (Image source: Gantry official website)
Former OpenAI Applied team member Margaret Jennings has founded the enterprise AI security platform startup Kindo, which has secured $7 million in funding. The company primarily assists businesses in addressing security, compliance, and centralized management issues related to generative AI, enabling enterprises to safely and securely leverage AI.
The platform enables businesses to connect to any private, open source, or commercial AI models and supports integration with over 200 SaaS providers. Employees can leverage these integrations to create no-code, AI-driven workflows.
Founded by former COO of OpenAI, Jeff Arnold, fintech startup Piolt offers financial automation reporting for enterprises. It has raised over $150 million in total funding, with OpenAI being one of its clients.
In 2017, former OpenAI technicians Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan departed OpenAI to establish Covariant, a company providing solutions for industrial robotics, which has secured up to $222 million in funding.
Last month, the company announced the release of its robot foundational model, RFM-1, which endows robots with human-like reasoning capabilities. In demonstration videos, the system correctly responds to complex commands such as "pick up the red object" and "pick up items on your foot before putting on shoes."
Daedalus, a robotics startup founded in 2017 by Jonas Schneider, who previously led the robotics team at OpenAI, has secured $41 million in funding. Investors include NGP Capital, a subsidiary of Nokia, and Y Combinator.
The company's current orders mainly come from industries such as medical devices, aerospace, defense, and semiconductors. Its next step is to create AI-driven factories for manufacturing customized precision parts.
Prosper Robotics, a household robot development company founded in 2021, is led by its founder Shariq Hashme, a former technical personnel at OpenAI. The company has engineered a robot capable of tasks such as dishwashing, laundry, floor cleaning, and preparing simple meals like salads, with plans for market release within the next few years.
Indeed, in its early days, the robotics team was a crucial part of OpenAI. However, due to the significant investment required for commercializing robotics products and the lengthy market validation process, OpenAI announced the dissolution of its robotics team in July 2021, suspending indefinitely its exploration in the field of robotics.
Apart from those closely aligned with OpenAI's previous research directions, there's a cohort of researchers venturing into new territories, such as pursuing independent research, delving into biotechnology R&D, or joining investment firms.
Some of these tech professionals' career moves are still in stealth mode.
On March 1st, Logan Kilpatrick, the head of developer relations at OpenAI, announced his departure from the organization. His role primarily involved supporting developers in utilizing the OpenAI API and ChatGPT for building applications.
(Image Source: GitHub Profile)
Kilpatrick's role at OpenAI was to assist developers in building with their API and ChatGPT plugins.
However, the latest departure has yet to announce their next career move.
Following his departure from OpenAI, Kilpatrick tweeted his views on open-source AI, stating, "Open-source AI is a win-win for developers, businesses, and humanity." It's unclear if his departure is significantly related to OpenAI not going open-source.
In March last year, LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman announced his resignation from the OpenAI board. He intends to invest in companies using OpenAI software, potentially causing conflicts of interest. Hoffman is also a co-founder of Inflection AI, a direct competitor to OpenAI.
Amodei, founder of Anthropic, led a team of dozens to depart, and alongside him, Paul Christiano, from the same department, also chose to leave, founding the independent research institution Alignment Research Center (ARC). He previously led the development of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) at OpenAI, but believes that as AI becomes more powerful, this approach may not be viable. Therefore, he established ARC in hopes of finding methods to compel large models to tell the truth and reveal all they "know."
▲ Paul Christiano (Image Source: Personal Homepage)
Prior to the dismissal drama involving OpenAI CEO Altman, another employee affected was Altman's assistant, Alex Cohen. After leaving OpenAI, Cohen found a new job in just 16 minutes - as the Chief AI Researcher at Roofer, a startup focused on drone and AI technology.
▲ Alex Cohen (Image Source: X)
Outside the AI field, some former employees of OpenAI have shifted their focus to other technological avenues.
Matt Krisiloff, a former founding team member of OpenAI, is involved in a biotech startup called Conception. The company's in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) technology aims to reduce the risk for infertile couples. In the long term, it could also serve as a crucial platform for extensive embryo genetic screening.
Matt Krisiloff (Image source: NPR)
Living Carbon, a company founded by former OpenAI Special Projects Manager Maddie Hail, aims to restore ecosystems, improve biodiversity, and enhance the ability of photosynthetic organisms to absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere, based on scientific research findings.
Conclusion: OpenAI Cultivating Silicon Valley's New "Mafia"
OpenAI has solidified its dominance in the current landscape of large-scale models, and working there has become a prestigious badge for entrepreneurs in the field.
As these startups accelerate their technological development and bring products to market, this prestigious badge is slowly being replaced by the blockbuster products created by these renowned experts.
In the tech industry, these entrepreneurial players are stepping into the spotlight, rising to prominence in their own arenas.
