(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 Molla10h

Tesla’s Model Y just cleared a new federal safety bar

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced today that Tesla Model Ys manufactured after November 12 were the first to pass the agency’s new advanced driver assistance system tests, which are now part of the New Car Assessment Program.

“By successfully passing these new tests, the 2026 Tesla Model Y demonstrates the lifesaving potential of driver assistance technologies and sets a high bar for the industry,” NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison wrote in the press release. “We hope to see many more manufacturers develop vehicles that can meet these requirements.”

The new tests include:

Pedestrian automatic emergency braking
Lane-keeping assistance
Blind spot warning
Blind spot intervention

The milestone offers Tesla highly coveted regulatory validation, as it seeks to spur usage of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) tech. The NHTSA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

80x

Jon Keegan10h

We knew Claude Code was driving crazy growth at Anthropic, but it may be much more than the company is expecting.

Speaking at the company’s developer conference yesterday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that while the company is planning for 10x growth this year, it could be as much as 80x, calling the overwhelming demand “crazy” and that he looked forward to more modest growth, saying such growth is “too hard to handle.”

The demand is so great that Anthropic partnered with Elon Musk’s xAI to buy up the bulk of computing from his Colossus data center in Tennessee.

Rani Molla16h

Tesla’s made-in-China vehicle sales jumped 36% in April

Tesla’s sales of made-in-China vehicles — sold across China, Europe, and other international markets — rose 36% year over year to 79,478 units in April. The increase marks the sixth straight month of annual growth in sales of vehicles made in the world’s largest manufacturing economy, suggesting the EV maker’s overseas business may be stabilizing after a difficult stretch.

That said, China wholesale deliveries fell from March, even as overall new energy vehicle sales rose 7% during the period.

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

Tesla China April wholesale sales jump year-on-year but slip from March

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

Rani Molla5/6/26

Anthropic’s scramble for compute now includes rival xAI

Another day, another major partnership with an AI rival. This time, Anthropic signed a deal with SpaceX’s xAI to access compute from its Colossus 1 data center to help it improve capacity for its Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. Just yesterday, The Information reported that Anthropic planned to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud services over the next five years. As Sherwood News’ Luke Kawa wrote:

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

xAI — Creators of Grok, the AI Chatbot

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

5/6/26