AI Competition Heats Up With OpenAI Alumni On the Prowl

The fight for AI talent is starting to look like the end of a Marvel movie — a million fighters large and small. 

Bloomberg reported on Monday that Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder who left the company after some highly ambiguous involvement in the extremely short-lived ousting of Sam Altman in 2023, is in talks to raise over $1 billion for his own AI startup. Meanwhile, a company founded by another OpenAI alumna, one-time Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, just came out of stealth mode having already hived off some top talent from Big Tech bulwarks.

Talent Contest

Sutskever left OpenAI in May last year, hanging on surprisingly long after Altman’s surprise firing and re-hiring by the board six months previously, given reports that Sutskever played a crucial role in the board’s decision to give Altman the boot in the first place. Sutskever was quick to develop his new company, Safe Superintelligence, which announced a $1 billion raise last September.

Now it’s on the hunt for investment once again, per Bloomberg, and the new fundraise could bring its valuation to over $30 billion, a source told the outlet. OpenAI is reportedly targeting a valuation of roughly $300 billion, but gaining a tenth of the valuation of the world’s best-known AI startup ain’t bad. Now Murati’s firing up the ovens on her new startup, too:

• Murati’s company on Tuesday announced its name, Thinking Machines Lab. It gave a fairly broad mission statement, saying it wants to make AI systems: “more widely understood, customizable and generally capable.”
• Per a Wired report the company’s first 10 hires included a senior OpenAI executive plus talent from Google DeepMind and Character AI. Thinking Machines Lab confirmed on Tuesday that it now has multiple ex-OpenAI staffers, including the company’s former VP of research Barret Zoph.

Sutskever and Murati aren’t the only OpenAI execs to have struck out on their own. By September last year, only three of OpenAI’s 11 cofounders remained at the company, The Verge reported. 

The Real China-America Trade War: It’s not just poaching season for OpenAI alumni. The Information reported on Tuesday that a Google engineer with 17 years at the company is moving to TikTok-owner ByteDance to lead the company’s foundational AI research team.