OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup
22 comments
·February 7, 2025lm28469
bko
I think it's simpler than that.
Mira's startup was able to raise 100 million on just an idea. So she can just leave and become a paper centi-millionaire overnight and run the whole org. How can someone compete with that? You can't throw enough money at these guys to get them to stay
If the AI hype keeps going for another year or two, I'll look forward to Schulman leaving this new startup to start his own and raising another 9 figure amount where he's the majority stakeholder.
charlie0
Bingo. Founders end up taking the lion's share of all the stock. I've seen this over and over again everywhere, don't be a founding engineer, it's financially not worth it. This i the most evident when you're talking about close to 100M just by changing 1 position, into founder/CEO.
openrisk
Not sure its my filters working to remove nuisance news but the "singularity" plot and "AI safety" seem a bit less prevalent these days? Maybe the nature of these algorithms is finally diffusing to wider audiences?
tbrownaw
The singularity stuff was mostly coming out of the lesswrong/miri/etc crowd. Maybe they've moved on, or maybe they've lost influence.
The AI safety stuff seemed like half an extension of that, and half early movers (eg openai) calling for regulators to hand them a moat. Between things like deepseek on the one hand and laws already being passed on the other hand, there's probably less use in spending energy agitating for moats now.
rapsey
Way too much money going around.
skeeter2020
20 years ago I would have said a group of smart visionaries getting a pile of money with no publicly shared vision, product or direction was an exciting, positive thing. Somewhere over the past 5-10 years this morphed into cynicism as I await to see how they will light it on fire this time.
asadotzler
maybe because of bitcoin, nfts, iot, ai, metaverse, all these other endeavors that sucked up billions and gave us nothing of benefit in return.
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kittikitti
They are all big tech plants and this incestuous behavior is by design.
jstummbillig
I don't see anything particularly inexplicable going on. Insane level of attention and development moves people and any industry quickly. Everything is more exaggerated and extreme.
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moron4hire
Very inefficient. Where's the DOGE for VCs just burning capital?
lumost
Rapid movement of key employees should be a sign that they don't believe there is a moat in this space either. If there was a moat, then they would be stuck where they are for lack of opportunity.
moralestapia
>It remains unclear why Schulman chose to leave Anthropic so soon after joining [...]
Money! Duh.
handzhiev
Has Mira shown anything from her new startup so far? Genuine question. I am trying to keep up with the space, but never heard anything about her after leaving OpenAI except that she got some investors.
newbie578
Doesn't the cofounder role kinda lose its power when there are like 10 of them, or I don't know how many OpenAI cofounders there are, every day it feels like a new one emerges.
neilv
How do these prominent AI startups hire engineering ICs?
Is it mostly poaching known-quantities and networks, are they using recruiters, or are people cold-applying?
OutOfHere
OpenAI doesn't really do fundamental research anymore; they simply build on it and scale it up. Nothing different can be expected in this regard from any fork of OpenAI. Granted, a fork could actually be open for a change.
oldpersonintx
[dead]
All these companies are 0.5 months away from "singularity" and "super intelligence" yet no one sticks with them for more than a couple of months. Something doesn't add up