Already rich, already successful, why the latest wave of tech winners are grinding again

There is a pattern that emerges among people who have already achieved great success. They’re rolling up their sleeves again, apparently for fear of missing out on AI’s defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible pull of making more money — and perhaps a lot more.

Tom Bloomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a partner at Y Combinator, Announced on Monday He’s taking a leave of absence to join the computing team at Anthropic — not as a CEO, but as a member of the technical staff.

He’s not alone in making this kind of move. Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, will join Anthropic as chief product officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who went on to lead AI at Tesla and start his own company, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, and he framed the decision almost identically to Blomfield’s, writing that “the next few years will be on the frontiers of LLMs.” Particularly formative“.

Not everyone joins someone else’s lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the “SPAC King” who mostly stuck to boards and all things”All inSince leaving Facebook in 2011, he has just taken on his first full-time operating role in more than a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, an artificial intelligence programming startup, which he announced A few weeks ago Along with a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. “I am convinced that what we are building now is just that,” Palihapitiya wrote on X More importantSo there was no decision to be made except for us to join everyone.”

Likewise, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for ten years before stepping back in 2023, Recently launched NavigateAI, an AI “assistant” for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. “I knew that if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do anything related to it, I would probably regret it,” Wu told me directly in a recent call about his decision to dive into an AI startup.

The clearest sign of how eager people who have already “made it” are working on what they see as early AI roles may be the job title itself. “Technical staff member” is the flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for almost everyone on their technical teams, regardless of seniority. It’s the same title Bloomfield takes.

It’s also a title that Peter Bailis earned in March, just months after taking over as CTO at Workday, a role overseeing AI strategy across the $8 billion-revenue business. The bail lasted less than a year Trading it To get a place in Anthropy.