A growing trend is emerging among tech founders who have already achieved significant success. These individuals are returning to work on AI research, driven by a desire to be part of the field's defining moment and the potential for substantial financial gain. Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo, is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team as a member of technical staff. He is not alone in this move, as Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May. Karpathy described the decision as being driven by the importance of the next few years at the frontier of large language models (LLMs).
Other notable figures are also entering the AI space. Chamath Palihapitiya, known as the 'SPAC King,' has taken his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, his enterprise AI coding startup, which secured $135 million in Series A funding. Palihapitiya emphasized the importance of what they are building, stating there was 'no decision to make except to be all in.' Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI 'copilot' for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. Wu expressed his motivation by saying, 'I knew if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something related to it, I would probably regret that.'
The trend reflects a broader shift in how these individuals view their roles in the AI landscape. Anthropic and OpenAI use the title 'member of technical staff' for their technical teams, a deliberately flat, non-hierarchical label. This title is also used by Peter Bailis, who recently left his role as Workday’s CTO to join Anthropic. The move highlights the growing interest in AI research among those who have already achieved success in the tech industry.
Source: techcrunch
