I tracked 240+ talent moves across 80+ companies. Almost every major AI startup traces back to a handful of labs. OpenAI alumni alone founded 18 startups. Anthropic, Perplexity, SSI, Thinking Machines Lab… all started by ex-OpenAI people. Mistral? Five of its researchers came from Meta’s Llama team. Physical Intelligence, Sakana AI, Character.AI: all ex-Google/DeepMind. The playbook seems to always be the same: join a big lab, get access to compute and data, build your reputation, leave, raise hundreds of millions on day one. Some counterexamples: Midjourney: founder came from NASA, not an AI lab. Cursor: probably the best counterexample, valued at ~30B. Four MIT undergrads. Hugging Face: France-based, no big-lab ties, but founder had sold a company to Google before. LangChain: creator wasn’t in a big lab from what I know. So can you actually compete without that pedigree? If the path is academia → big lab → startup, what happens to people who skip the middle step? Are they locked out of funding and talent networks?a Will the ‘democratization’ of AI tools help or do more harm? It’s easier than ever to create a startup from zero. But it’s also easier than ever for big companies to just buy (or even worse, copy) these startups. Curious what people think, especially anyone building an AI company who didn’t come out of one of these labs. If anyone is interested, I put the data together in an interactive tracker at https://7min.ai/exodus submitted by /u/fabioperez
Originally posted by u/fabioperez on r/ArtificialInteligence