Alumni of OpenAI · San Francisco

OpenAI Mafia

Researchers and leaders who left OpenAI have started several of the most valuable AI labs of the decade.

8alumni startups
8named on Labspie
19founders
$1.03tnin unicorn valuations
AnthropicDario Amodei, Daniela Amodei +6Safe SuperintelligenceIlya Sutskever, Daniel LevyThinking Machines LabMira Murati, John SchulmanPerplexityAravind SrinivasAdeptDavid LuanCovariantPieter Abbeel, Peter Chen +1CrestaTim ShiEureka LabsAndrej KarpathyOpenAI

The companies

CompanyFounded by (OpenAI alumni)FieldBased inValuation
Anthropic
Safety-focused lab building the Claude models.
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Jack Clark, Chris Olah, Ben MannAISan Francisco, United States$965bn
Safe Superintelligence
Research lab focused on safe superintelligence.
Ilya Sutskever, Daniel LevyAIPalo Alto, United States$32bn
Thinking Machines Lab
Research and product lab for adaptable AI systems.
Mira Murati, John SchulmanAISan Francisco, United States$12bn
Perplexity
Answer engine that cites its sources.
Aravind SrinivasAISan Francisco, United States$20bn
Adept
Agents that use software the way people do.
David LuanAISan Francisco, United States–
Covariant
Foundation models for warehouse robots.
Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky DuanHardwareEmeryville, United States–
Cresta
Real-time AI for contact centre agents.
Tim ShiAISan Francisco, United States$1.6bn
Eureka Labs
AI-native school.
Andrej KarpathyEducationSan Francisco, United States–

More mafias

Alumni of PayPal

PayPal Mafia

The original startup mafia. Early PayPal staff went on to found or fund LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Tesla, SpaceX and Palantir.

TeslaSpaceXLinkedInYouTubeYelpPalantir+2
10 founders named8 startups
Alumni of Google DeepMind$19.1bn in unicorns

DeepMind Mafia

London's deepest bench of AI talent. DeepMind alumni now run labs in London, Paris, New York and the Bay Area.

Inflection AIMistral AIIsomorphic LabsLatent LabsIneffable IntelligenceH Company+2
11 founders named8 startups
Alumni of Google Brain$7.8bn in unicorns

The Transformer Eight

Six of the eight Google authors of "Attention Is All You Need" (2017), the paper behind today's language models, went on to found companies.

Character.AICohereSakana AIEssential AIInceptiveNEAR Protocol
7 founders named6 startups