Jonathan Kitchen
It’s been over two years that artificial intelligence has become the talk of the town.
The use of generative AI in emerging technologies has taken a sudden leap, its effects rippling outwards to the point that it has largely influenced Wall Street. The frenzy, which started with ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022, saw excited investors pouring billions of dollars into this innovative technology.
Seeking Alpha has started an AI series wherein, each weekend, we will write on trending models and latest announcements, including key insights on valuation and metrics.
ChatGPT’s launch gave rise to Silicon Valley’s OpenAI mafia, an informal term used to refer to influential former OpenAI employees who have started their own AI ventures. OpenAI mafia draws comparisons with “PayPal Mafia,” referring to early PayPal employees including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, who left the firm and became major players in the tech industry.
Today we are discussing two of the leading startups by these OpenAI alumni: Thinking Machines Lab by former CTO and interim CEO Mira Murati and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei’s Anthropic.
Murati rose to fame when she was named interim CEO of Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI in 2023, when Sam Altman was briefly ousted from the position. She suddenly left the company in September last year and launched her startup in February.
Recently, San Francisco-based Thinking Machines Lab was in focus after Murati raised $2B at a valuation of $12B in a funding round, which was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and included participation by Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW), Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) and others.
The massive funding round for a startup, which has no revenue or products yet, represents investor appetite to back promising new AI labs. The firm has not properly revealed what it’s working on, with Murati just saying that it is building multimodal AI that works with the ways people naturally interact with the world, including through conversation and sight.
Thinking Machines Lab not only attracted researchers and engineers from competitors like Meta AI but also recruited Murati’s OpenAI colleagues John Schulman, Jonathan Lachman, and Barret Zoph. Meta reportedly held talks to acquire the startup to bolster its superintelligence efforts, but it didn’t progress to a final offer.
Similarly, Amazon (AMZN) and Google-backed (GOOG) Anthropic in March reached a towering valuation of $61.5B, following the completion of its latest $3.5B funding round. Amazon previously invested $4B into the startup and is reportedly exploring the possibility of making an additional multibillion-dollar investment.
Founded in 2021, Anthropic is a major OpenAI rival that is best known for its Claude family of large language models. The firm has reportedly reached an annualized revenue rate of $4 billion in July, which is already four times higher than the beginning of the year.
Anthropic’s Claude models are built to carry out similar tasks to ChatGPT by responding to prompts with human-like text output. The models exploded in popularity, with firms including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Zoom (NASDAQ:ZM) and Amazon integrating them to power their ecosystem.
Claude AI reportedly had 18.9M monthly active users worldwide as of early 2025.
Other notable companies involving former OpenAI employees include Stem AI, Eureka Labs, Living Carbon, Prosper Robotics, Cresta, and Covariant.