The OpenAI mafia just got bigger. Last year, AIM set out to investigate how many former OpenAI employees had quit the company to launch their own ventures. The results are astonishing! Close to 75 employees have left OpenAI and founded around 30 AI startups.
Most recently, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy turned his decades-old passion for AI and education into a company called Eureka Labs. “It’s a new kind of school that is AI-native, combining generative AI with traditional learning methods,” said Karpathy.
However, Karpathy’s departure from OpenAI wasn’t as dramatic as Ilya Sutskever.
“‘Nothing “happened,” said Karpathy, “and it’s not a result of any particular event, issue, or drama (but please keep the conspiracy theories coming as they are highly entertaining :)).'”
Meanwhile, Sutskever left OpenAI, citing AGI safety concerns. Months later, he launched Safe Superintelligence.
Along with Sutsekver, Jan Leike, OpenAI’s head of alignment, also resigned and joined Anthropic, an AI company founded by former OpenAI employees. At Anthropic, Leike announced he would continue working on the “super alignment mission”, focusing on scalable oversight, weak-to-strong generalisation, and automated alignment research.
“I think the OpenAI mafia will reach #1 in a few years. Ex-employees of OpenAI in senior positions left to start their own cutting-edge projects like Anthropic and xAI, and they are wildly successful,” posted a user on X. “Prediction: the group at OpenAI will make the PayPal mafia look like peanuts,” posted another user.
To be honest, OpenAI is an intriguing place to work. Recently, Steven Heidel, an employee at OpenAI, posted, “The only real downside to working at OpenAI is all the cool stuff you get to see but aren’t allowed to talk about yet.”
Super Dramatic Founders
Another notable startup emerging from OpenAI is Perplexity AI. Interestingly, when Aravind Srinivas joined OpenAI as a research intern, Elon Musk left the company. “I got into OpenAI for an internship in 2018, when Musk was still there,” recalled Srinivas in a recent interview.
“I remember Musk left around the time I joined. I was idolizing this guy, and then he calls an all-hands meeting, announces that he’s no longer going to be involved, and swears at people left, right, and center before leaving the room. It was a lot of drama.”
Notably, last year Musk founded his own AI startup, xAI. One of xAI’s first major products is Grok, an AI chatbot integrated with X (formerly Twitter). Grok was unveiled in November 2023, with subsequent improvements leading to the Grok-1.5 model, which includes long-context capabilities and image understanding.
One cannot definitely overlook Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI employees Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, which is now giving OpenAI stiff competition. The company recently released Claude Sonnet, a model that rivals GPT-4o in performance.
Tim Salimans, a former research scientist and team lead at OpenAI, founded Aidence, a company specialising in generative modeling, semi-supervised and unsupervised deep learning, and reinforcement learning in 2015. Tim Shi, previously a member of technical staff at OpenAI, founded Cresta in 2017, which uses AI to help sales and service agents enhance their customer interactions.
In 2021, a former research intern at OpenAI, Anish Athalye, started Cleanlab, a data-centric AI platform that automatically finds and fixes errors in ML datasets. Another former research engineer at OpenAI, Taehoon Kim, recently founded Symbiote AI, a real-time, 3D avatar generation platform.
Other prominent startups from the OpenAI alumni network include Pilot, Covariant, Adept, Living Carbon, Quill (now part of Twitter), and Daedalus, among others.
Will we see more? It’s highly likely that more employees might leave the company to start their own ventures. Last year, Altman bragged that OpenAI had a very lean team of about 375 employees. However, when he was fired, at least 745 of OpenAI’s approximately 750 staff signed a letter demanding his reinstatement, indicating that the company’s headcount is gradually increasing.
OpenAI had approximately 2,500 employees as of last month and who knows how many more AI startups would spin out of the company.
It is fascinating to see new tech entrepreneurs being born out of the OpenAI ecosystem, which is acting as a training ground for future AI leaders. “For a company like ours, the researchers and engineers that create the tech have far more impact than the CEO,” said Altman.
A quick look at its work culture shows that OpenAI encourages its employees to take creative risks in pursuit of advancements in AI and emphasis on collaboration, open communication and more.
