ANALYSIS

Exodus at OpenAI: How AI startups benefit from ex-ChatGPT employees

Julia Isabelle Gerber23. August 2024, 11:04

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OpenAI is the world’s leading AI startup and is said to have a valuation of more than $80 billion. According to investors, it is worth more than other tech unicorns such as Shein, Revolut, or Stripe, all of which are said to be going public soon. Of course, OpenAI is in a class of its own with its AI models GPT-4o, Sora, Dall-E, and Whisper. But in recent weeks and months, numerous co-founders and leading minds have turned away from Sam Altman’s team.

The biggest beneficiary of the migration trends is clearly the competing AI startup Anthropic. This is supported with billions of dollars by Amazon and Google (the rivals of OpenAI’s major investor Microsoft) and was founded in 2021 by four former OpenAI employees (Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Jack Clark, and Jared Kaplan). In the last few weeks, Anthropic has been reinforced by two high-ranking OpenAI minds: former OpenAI co-founder John Schulman and former Head of Alignment Jan Leike.

Anthropic has sent its Claude family into the race against GPT-4 and Co and has one main goal: safety. They want to teach AI the HHH principle (“Helpful, Honest & Harmless”), and to do this, not only humans should evaluate how good or bad the outputs are, but they should also adhere to important principles such as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights or Apple’s privacy policy. Claude also points out that the AI chatbot can make mistakes; but unlike Google, OpenAI, Grok, or Meta’s Llama 3, Anthropic has so far been spared any major missteps.

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Covariant and xAI with many former OpenAI heads

The second important AI startup to emerge from OpenAI is called Covariant. It was founded in 2017 by Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang, with Chen, Duan, and Abbeel all previously working at OpenAI. They are working on an AI robotics platform, raised a total of $222 million in investments in 2023, and finally launched their own foundation model, RFM-1, in 2024. The German Otto Group, for example, wants to develop robots for its logistics centers together with Covariant, and the Czech Rohlik Group (also known as gurkerl.at or knuspr.de) is also listed as a partner.

Also worth mentioning is Elon Musk with his conglomerate of companies such as Tesla, X or xAI. At xAI, which develops the AI chatbot Grok and the AI model behind it, the former OpenAI researchers and developers Igor Babuschkin, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, and Kyle Kosic have joined as co-founders. Andrej Karpathy moved to Tesla several years ago as OpenAI co-founder, then returned to OpenAI to work on GPT-4 and has been running his Eureka Labs since summer 2024. He is also one of the investors in the US-Austrian AI startup Magic.