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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.

Jon Keegan

10h

OpenAI and Microsoft reach agreement that moves OpenAI closer to for-profit status

In a joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” for their renegotiated $13 billion partnership, which was a source of recent tension between the two companies.

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling non-profit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would “making it one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission—and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission—and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

Rani Molla

14h

BofA doesn’t expect Tesla’s ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it’s not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don’t expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in ’25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full self-driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist, but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride-shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (nine-minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan9/10/25

Jon Keegan

9/10/25

Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal