OpenAI, the firm behind AI sensation ChatGPT, is reportedly mostly made up of former Big Tech employees. According to Business Insider, the majority of the firm’s 200-plus employees came from Google parent Alphabet, Facebook parent Meta, Apple, and Amazon — commonly known as Big Four tech companies. The publication cites data from LeadGenius and Punks & Pinstripes.
The new report says that 59 of OpenAI’s current employees formerly worked for Google or its AI research lab DeepMind in the past. The Microsoft-backed startup also employs 34 former Meta staff, 15 former Apple staff, and 11 former Amazon staff. That’s 119 employees snatched up from the Big Four. Even its leadership team is predominantly made up of former Google, Meta, and Apple employees. Tesla’s former head of Autopilot Andrej Karpathy joined OpenAI earlier this month.
Dropbox, Stripe, Uber, Quora, Microsoft, HP, and Airbnb are among other companies from where the AI startup hired workers. Overall, the report names former employers of 193 current OpenAI staff, with total employees said to be “200-plus”. The data may not be updated, though. The company’s COE Sam Altman last month said that it currently employs 375 people. It appears the startup significantly added to its workforce in recent months. Considering ChatGPT’s flying start, that isn’t surprising at all.
ChatGPT continues to attract talent from Google and other big tech companies
In fact, OpenAI continues to capture more talent from the Big Four. AI research engineer Hyung Won Chung tweeted a couple of weeks back that they are joining OpenAI after spending three years at Google. A former senior research scientist at Google also announced a switch to the AI startup on the same day. Punks & Pinstripes CEO Greg Larkin says it’s a “wakeup call” for these companies because they aren’t “optimizing their investments in their employees”. Punks & Pinstripes is a network of Fortune 500 executives.
“A lot of AI talent has been working on secondary products in innovation labs like Alphabet X. For many, this means that they rarely see their work have a meaningful impact on the company’s core products or earnings,” Larkin says. As such, they switched to OpenAI where they saw a better opportunity to make their efforts count. Sure enough, ChatGPT has taken the internet world by storm in just a few months of its existence. The AI-powered conversational chatbot is a hot topic across all online platforms.
Google has also launched its ChatGPT rival in the form of Bard. Industry experts see fierce competition between the two in this rapidly evolving AI war. It will be interesting to see who comes out on top. OpenAI may have a headstart, but Google’s pool of talent and resources is stronger.
2023-02-27 15:08:02