(Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images)

OpenAI alumni startups take shape

New details on former OpenAI executives Murati and Sutskever’s startups.

2/18/25 3:59PM

During the fall of 2024, OpenAI was shedding executives at an alarming rate. Since then, two of the most prominent alumni have been building up their new startups, and both are making news.

Mira Murati

The former CTO (and briefly the CEO) of OpenAI announced her departure in September 2024 amid a flurry of resignations. Since then, she’s aimed to raise over $100 million for her new startup and poached OpenAI cofounder John Schulman from Anthropic after only five months at the company. Today, Murati announced her new startup, called “Thinking Machines Lab,” which will be centered on AI research and build its own models.

I started Thinking Machines Lab alongside a remarkable team of scientists, engineers, and builders. We're building three things:
- Helping people adapt AI systems to work for their specific needs
- Developing strong foundations to build more capable AI systems
- Fostering a…
— Mira Murati (@miramurati) February 18, 2025

Joining Murati are 20 former OpenAI employees, as well as others from Meta, Google’s DeepMind, Mistral AI, and Character AI.

llya Sutskever

In May 2024, OpenAI cofounder and former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever left the company, and a month later he announced his new startup called “Safe Superintelligence Inc.” (SSI).

In September 2024, Sutsekver revealed that SSI had raised $1 billion from Andreesen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and others.

Now, Bloomberg is reporting that Sutskever is raising an additional $1 billion, led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, and that SSI has a $30 billion valuation. The startup is focusing on achieving AGI with a focus on safety, but it hasn’t revealed any specific plans yet.

Rani Molla2h

Elon Musk’s SpaceX reportedly in talks to merge with xAI

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reportedly exploring a merger between SpaceX and his artificial intelligence startup xAI, a move that would bundle rockets, satellites, the social media site X, and AI under one company ahead of SpaceX’s long-anticipated IPO.

According to Reuters reporting, the deal would swap xAI shares for SpaceX stock, potentially valuing the combined operation north of $1 trillion.

Reuters reports:

Two entities have been set up in Nevada to facilitate the transaction, the person said.

Reuters could not determine the value of the deal, its ‌primary rationale, or its potential timing.

Corporate filings in Nevada show that those entities were set up on January 21. One of them, a limited liability company, lists SpaceX and Bret Johnsen, the company's chief financial officer, as managing members, while the other lists Johnsen as the company's only officer, the filings show.

The combined companies could also set the narrative groundwork for putting data centers in space — an idea that Musk and a number of other tech billionaires have been floating lately but that may not get off the ground.

In its earnings filings yesterday, Tesla disclosed that it recently made a $2 billion investment in xAI. Last year Musk’s xAI bought Musk’s X in an all-stock deal.

Exclusive: Musk's SpaceX in merger talks with xAI ahead of planned IPO, source says

Reuters reports:

Two entities have been set up in Nevada to facilitate the transaction, the person said.

Reuters could not determine the value of the deal, its ‌primary rationale, or its potential timing.

Corporate filings in Nevada show that those entities were set up on January 21. One of them, a limited liability company, lists SpaceX and Bret Johnsen, the company's chief financial officer, as managing members, while the other lists Johnsen as the company's only officer, the filings show.

In its earnings filings yesterday, Tesla disclosed that it recently made a $2 billion investment in xAI. Last year Musk’s xAI bought Musk’s X in an all-stock deal.

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Rani Molla3h

Driverless Waymo struck a child near school in California

A Google Waymo struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school during morning drop-off last week, as self-driving cars by Waymo, Tesla, and others continue their expansion across the country. In a blog post, Waymo said the fully driverless car detected the child as they emerged from behind a parked SUV, braked sharply, and reduced speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before striking the child. The child suffered minor injuries and walked away.

The company reported the incident to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is currently investigating, adding fresh scrutiny to how robotaxis perform in the wild.

Jon Keegan5h

Digging into Microsoft’s cloud backlog

Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing unit is seeing huge demand. In yesterday’s second-quarter earnings call, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company’s commercial bookings increased 230% thanks to large commitments from OpenAI and Anthropic and healthy demand for its Azure cloud computing platform.

Hood said that the company’s “remaining performance obligations” (RPO) ballooned to a staggering $625 billion, up 110% from the same period last year. How long will it take for Microsoft to fulfill these booked services? Hood said the weighted average duration was “approximately two and a half years,” but a quarter of that will be recognized in revenue in the next 12 months.

Shares of Microsoft tanked today, down over 11%, despite the strong beat on revenue and earnings. The drop puts the stock on track to have its worst single-day drop since March of 2020.

Investors may be concerned that while huge, that extra demand was coming only from OpenAI, an issue that Oracle recently experienced.

But Hood said the non-OpenAI RPO still grew 28% year on year, which reflects “ongoing broad customer demand across the portfolio.”

Meta and Tesla are funding the future with their core businesses — but only one of them is still growing

The two tech giants, on back-to-back earnings calls, made it sound like they’re selling the same AI-powered future. But the picture of the underlying businesses, and how they’re using AI to furnish current sales, couldn’t be more different.

Rani Molla5h