Top AI builders are quitting big labs to start their own

While OpenAI and Nvidia's CEO say the age of human-level AI is here, many of the people who built today's AI are walking away from the big labs. They are starting their own companies and raising billions with no product to show. The tech outlet The Decoder counted 45 of these new labs, which it calls neolabs.

Who is leaving

After the launch of GPT-6 Astra, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote on X that AGI has arrived. AGI means AI that matches human ability broadly, and there is no agreed definition. OpenAI president Greg Brockman welcomed people to the AGI era. Meanwhile, the departures keep coming:

• Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder, now builds Safe Superintelligence.
• Jerry Tworek, who led OpenAI's reasoning models, runs Core Automation.
• David Silver, behind AlphaGo, left Google DeepMind for Ineffable Intelligence.
• Yann LeCun left Meta after twelve years and founded AMI.
• Jeff Dean, 27 years at Google, started Discovery Loop.

The money

Nvidia reportedly put five billion dollars into Sutskever's lab in July, according to Bloomberg. The lab has not released a model or a research paper. Jeff Bezos' Prometheus raised twelve billion dollars at a 41 billion valuation in June. Flapping Airplanes has no public model and raised one billion dollars in October.

Why they say they left

The motives are mixed. Founders can become paper billionaires fast. LeCun left after a strategy dispute with Meta. Sutskever wants to do research without product pressure. Others want a niche that would be a sideshow at a big lab. The shared doubt is not that powerful AI is coming. It is whether today's recipe alone gets there: ever-larger language models, trained on internet data and refined with reinforcement learning.

The risk for small labs

Big labs have more computing power, data pipelines and feedback from hundreds of millions of users. Leads can vanish quickly. TypeSafe AI launched a decision model in mid-September. Two weeks later, OpenAI announced its Decisions API.

Even a short lead can pay off as an exit. Microsoft hired the core team from Inflection. Google took the founders of Character.ai and the leaders of Windsurf. AMD wants to buy World Labs for about 8.2 billion dollars. Nvidia is in talks with Reflection, according to the Financial Times.

What it means for you

If these researchers are right, the AI tools you use now could change quickly. Some of the new labs may produce nothing. Others may build something the big players copy or buy. Tying your business to one vendor's promises carries more risk than it may seem.