The OpenAI trial brought renewed attention to the company’s early days. Today, only Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba remain at the company.
🖱 Wojciech Zaremba remains at OpenAI. He spent years leading robotics research and recently shifted his focus to AI safety and long-term alignment.
Elon Musk left the board in 2018 after disagreements over the company’s direction. He later launched xAI and merged it into SpaceX.
Ilya Sutskever left in 2024 after co-leading OpenAI’s research team and co-founded Safe Superintelligence, a company focused entirely on building safe AGI.
Andrej Karpathy left in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot team, returned briefly to OpenAI, founded education startup Eureka Labs, and has now joined Anthropic.
Durk Kingma, one of the most respected researchers in deep learning, moved to Google DeepMind and later joined Anthropic.
John Schulman helped create reinforcement learning systems behind ChatGPT. He left in 2024 and is now chief scientist at Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines.
Pamela Vagata was the first founder to leave. She joined Stripe’s AI efforts and later launched venture fund Pebblebed.
Trevor Blackwell had a background in robotics, left in 2017, and later became a partner at Y Combinator.
Vicki Cheung worked on engineering and infrastructure before leaving to co-found Gantry, a platform for improving machine learning systems.
OpenAI’s founders now lead or advise many of the most important companies in AI.
The original team ended up shaping the entire industry.
US Allows 10 Chinese Firms to Buy Nvidia H200 Chips
The US has authorized about 10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance, to purchase up to 75,000 Nvidia H200 chips each under US licensing rules.
These chips are critical for AI development, but China has imposed restrictions on buying foreign hardware since January and plans to continue supporting its emerging domestic production.
China sees the US move as a way to control its main competitor by limiting chip supply to maintain Nvidia's influence and revenue without ceding full technological advantage.
The AI race is no longer just about models but about controlling supply chains.