A pattern is emerging among people who have already achieved great success. They seem to be rolling up their sleeves again, out of fear of missing out on AI’s defining moment and perhaps the irresistible lure of making even more money (potentially more money).
Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo and then spent four-and-a-half years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group partner, announced Monday that he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team. You will participate as a member of the technical staff, not as an executive.
He’s not the only one making such moves. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger will join Anthropic as chief product officer in 2024, and Andrei Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who led AI at Tesla and founded his own company Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, writing that the framework for this decision was much the same as Blomfield’s, and that “the next few years on the LLM front will be particularly formative.”
Not everyone participates in other people’s labs. “SPAC King” Chamath Palihapitiya, who has been mostly “all-in” on boards and everything since leaving Facebook in 2011, has just stepped into his first full-time operational role in more than a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, an enterprise AI coding startup that he announced a few weeks ago with a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Palihapitiya wrote to X, “We had no choice but to go all in because we believe that what we are building now is even more important.”
Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for 10 years before exiting in 2023, recently raised $25 million in seed funding to launch NavigateAI, an AI “co-pilot” for construction workers. In a recent phone call, Wu spoke directly to me about his decision to join an AI startup. “I thought if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something related to it, I would probably regret it.”
The most obvious sign of how committed already “successful” people are to what they consider to be the early stages of AI may be the job title itself. “Member of technical staff” is an intentionally flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for nearly everyone on the technical team, regardless of seniority. It’s the same title that Bromfield holds.
It’s also a role Peter Bayliss took on in March, just months after he became Workday’s chief technology officer, overseeing the overall AI strategy for the $8 billion business. Baylis traded it for an Anthropic spot after less than a year.
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