What are the former OpenAI employees doing after leaving to start their own ventures? - SSI A company founded by OpenAI's former Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, with $2 billion in funding. Rumor has it they are focusing on continuous learning/online learning to address issues like the long update cycles of pre-training. - Thinking Machines Founded by Mira Murati (former OpenAI CTO) and Andrew Tulloch (former OpenAI researcher). Seed round in July 2025, raising around $2 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Their main product is customized training and fine-tuning of large AI models as a service, helping developers tackle infrastructure challenges like maintaining distributed training. Recently, there’s an open-source project that rivals Thinking Machines’ product, called OpenTinker. Link: https://open-tinker.(github.io)/opentinker-page/ - Worktrace AI Angela Jiang (former OpenAI Product Manager) is working on a product that helps businesses identify and automate repetitive tasks by observing employees. Seed round raised approximately $9.3 million, led by 8VC and Conviction, with participation from OpenAI Fund, Zero Shot, and several former OpenAI executives (Mira Murati, Jason Kwon, Joanne Jang, Nick Turley, etc.). - Applied Compute Founded by Yash Patil (former OpenAI researcher involved in the Codex project), Rhythm Garg (former OpenAI researcher), and Linden Li (former OpenAI researcher). Their main product is developing custom AI models for enterprises. Raised $100 million, led by Benchmark, with Sequoia and Conviction also participating. - Periodic Labs Founded by Liam (former OpenAI researcher) and Ekin Dogus Cubuk (former Google Brain researcher). Seed round raised $300 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Felicis and others. They are creating AI scientists, primarily focusing on material science, using AI to develop new materials. I’ve previously seen a similar venture from Alibaba DAMO Academy focusing on cancer screening with specialized large models. It seems to fall under the category of AI diving deep into specific human functional areas.