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A pattern is emerging among people who\u2019ve already made it big. They\u2019re rolling up their sleeves again, seemingly out of fear of missing AI\u2019s defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible allure of making even more money \u2014 potentially a lot more.<\/p>\n
Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced on Monday<\/a> that he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic\u2019s compute team \u2014 not as an executive, but as a member of technical staff.<\/p>\n He\u2019s not alone in making that kind of move. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined 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\u2019s pre-training team in May, framing the decision almost identically to Blomfield\u2019s, writing that \u201cthe next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Not everyone is joining someone else\u2019s lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the \u201cSPAC King\u201d who has mostly stuck to boardrooms and all things \u201cAll In<\/a>\u201d since leaving Facebook in 2011, just took his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, his enterprise AI coding startup, which he announced a couple of weeks ago<\/a> along with a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Wrote Palihapitiya on X, \u201cI am convinced that what we are building now is even more important<\/a>, so there was no decision to make except to be all in.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023, recently launched<\/a> NavigateAI, an AI \u201ccopilot\u201d for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. Wu told me directly on a recent call about his decision to dive into an AI startup, \u201cI knew if I looked back in 10 years and didn\u2019t do something related to it, I would probably regret that.\u201d<\/p>\n The clearest sign of how keen people who\u2019ve already \u201cmade it\u201d are to work on what they view as the still-early-innings of AI might be the job title itself. \u201cMember of technical staff\u201d is the deliberately flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for nearly everyone on their technical teams, regardless of seniority. It\u2019s the same title Blomfield is taking. <\/p>\n It\u2019s also the title that Peter Bailis took this March, just months after becoming Workday\u2019s CTO, a role overseeing AI strategy across an $8 billion-revenue business. Bailis lasted less than a year before trading it<\/a> for a spot at Anthropic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n