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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.

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Amazon expands low-price Haul section to 14 new markets as Amazon Bazaar app

Amazon is expanding its low-cost Amazon Haul experience to a new stand-alone app called Amazon Bazaar.

Amazon launched its Temu and Shein competitor a year ago as a US mobile storefront on its website and has since expanded to about a dozen markets. Consumers could purchase many items for under $10, as long as they were willing to stomach longer delivery times.

Now, thanks to success in those places, the programming is expanding to 14 new markets — Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Nigeria — with a new app and name: Amazon Bazaar.

“Both Amazon Haul and Amazon Bazaar deliver the same ultra low-price shopping experience, with different names chosen to better resonate with local language preferences and cultures,” the company said in a press release.

Amazon extends Haul’s ultra low-price shopping experience to 14 new destinations with new Amazon Bazaar app

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea

While data centers on land are getting all the attention, Big Tech’s vast network of undersea fiber-optic cables carry 99% of all international network traffic.

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Jon Keegan11h

After watching small drones reshape the battlefield in Ukraine, the US Army has announced plans to buy 1 million drones over the next two to three years, according to a report from Reuters.

The military threat of China’s dominance of the quadcopter-style drone industry is also driving the decision. But China’s control over much of the supply chain for drones, including rare earth magnets, sensors, and microcontrollers, will make it much harder for American drone manufacturers to catch up.

Rani Molla

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The wildest stuff Elon Musk said at Tesla’s shareholder meeting

Get ready to text and drive while the Optimus robot cures poverty.