OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history. OpenAI’s technology and ideas have spread throughout Silicon Valley and beyond, with more than 30 executives, engineers, and researchers who have left the company to start their own companies, raising a total of more than US$1 billion in financing. This has led to the emergence of the “OpenAI Mafia”, a powerful network of talent, social connections, and capital opportunities. This network is set to revolutionize the AI industry and will continue to shape the future of AI technology.
The “PayPal Mafia” is a group of tech geeks and business leaders who founded the online payments company PayPal in the early 2000s. After PayPal was acquired by eBay, these founders left one after another and shaped many well-known technology companies in just a dozen years, such as Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp. Now, the OpenAI Mafia is the new generation of AI companies founded by OpenAI employees in the past five years. This new generation of AI companies is driving a new round of technological frenzy and investment opportunities. OpenAI is an AI company dedicated to helping humans realize their beautiful vision and has delivered an astonishing number of AI models and possibilities to the industry with a small but elite team.
Anthropic is an AI company founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, the former vice president of research at OpenAI, and his sister Daniela Amodei, the vice president of security and policy at OpenAI. Anthropic focuses on research orientation rather than commercial products and has published four research rules on its official website, including “AI as a systematic science”, “scaling on a safe basis”, “instrumentalization and quantification of social influence of AI research” and “focused and cooperative research orientation”. Anthropic aims to provide a safe and effective platform for AI research and development, and to ensure that AI research is conducted in a responsible and ethical manner. The company also works to ensure that AI is used for the benefit of society and not for commercial gain.
Covariant, founded in 2017 by former OpenAI research scientist Peter Chen and UC Berkeley professors Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan and Tianhao Zhang, is an AI robotics company dedicated to using AI to improve the efficiency of industry and enterprise fields. In the 5 years since its establishment, Covariant has launched various robotic products to help with warehousing, handling and human interaction in factories, and has cooperated with leading companies in various fields such as pharmaceuticals, retail and cosmetics. Covariant has also opened a European center in London. Google has recently invested more than $300 million in Anthropic, a new company founded by former OpenAI employees, and its chat robot Claude is seen as a strong competitor to ChatGPT.
Jeff Arnold and Jessica McKellar founded Pilot, a SaaS company that provides automation for bookkeeping, tax and other financial reporting for growing businesses. Pilot strategically uses AI to enhance their product performance, such as using supervised learning to detect outliers in the balance sheet. Meanwhile, Jonas Schneider founded Daedalus in Europe, combining AI with fine industrial production in Germany. Daedalus uses AI-driven robots to automatically complete the end-to-end full link of user needs from CAD drawing, improving accuracy, reliability and speed of manufacturing. Both Pilot and Daedalus are leveraging AI to revolutionize their respective industries.
OpenAI is a research laboratory that focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to benefit humanity. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that AI is developed in a safe and responsible way. OpenAI’s employees have gone on to found several companies that adhere to OpenAI’s original intention of “”benefiting mankind””. These companies include Living Carbon, which uses CRISPR gene technology to help trees grow faster and balance Earth’s carbon emissions; Gantry, an AI-driven machine learning product monitoring company; Quill, an AI chat efficiency company; and Conception, an artificial selection company. All of these companies are dedicated to using AI to create products that are beneficial to human society.
OpenAI Mafia is a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, including Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel. They have invested a total of $1 billion in OpenAI, and Microsoft has invested an additional $1 billion and $10 billion in 2019 and 2023 respectively. Other companies in the OpenAI Mafia have also received capital injections from well-known investors, such as Gerylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, American Express Ventures, Temasek Holdings, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Amplify Partners, Addition, and Khosla Ventures. OpenAI Mafia also helps each other by investing in each other’s companies, such as Quill Chat receiving seed round financing from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The “PayPal Mafia” and the “OpenAI Mafia” are two groups of entrepreneurs and investors who have changed the world through their innovative ideas and investments. These two groups have been compared due to their similar results, but if we look back at the history of the past 65 years, we can see that this is not a coincidence. In 1958, the United States experienced the “”Eisenhower Recession”” due to a mismatch between post-war manufacturing capacity and demand. This crisis led to the establishment of the “Shockley Laboratory” by William Shockley, the father of the transistor, who recruited the smartest scientists and engineers. However, 8 of his top scientists, the “”Traitorous Eight””, left him and founded a well-known company and a new investment model: venture capital. This model has been used by the PayPal Mafia and the OpenAI Mafia to create innovative products and services that have changed the world.
The Silicon Valley technology world has been shaped by a group of “”traitors”” who left Fairchild Semiconductor Co. Ltd. in the 1950s, and the dot-com bubble of 1995-2000. These pioneers established companies such as Intel Corporation, Kleiner Perkins, AMD Semiconductor, National Semiconductor, and PayPal. After the bursting of the dot-com bubble, a new generation of engineers and scientists have established OpenAI Incubation, a company that specializes in artificial intelligence commercialization. This “Mafia organization” is maintained by a strong belief in the potential of technology to create general wisdom and well-being for humanity, and by a network of social and economic resources.
The three historical storyboards superimposed on each other show the three-dimensional structure of a period of weak economic structure and urgent need for transformation. During this time, the talents who first formed the organization have fought “tough battles” to understand how innovative companies find new models and survive. They set ambitious goals for themselves, aiming to be the most important company in the most important industry in the world. They also maintain a good social and economic relationship with people who have the same goals in the capital and the original organization, forming a network of inheritance and blood relationship. This may be the key to the birth of generations of “Mafia” in the technology industry and the maintenance of lasting innovation.
