COMPUTE! The AI industry, overheard · Est. 2026
Fortnightly
the web

The Web · №2

Vol. 2 · The Musical-Chairs edition. Every move below is on the record. Pull out, pin up, follow the string.

June 2, 2026 · collected in №2 · Musical Chairs

Pinned to the board this issue:

  • Elon Musk, who recruited Karpathy from OpenAI to Tesla in 2017 — illustrated stipple portrait
  • Andrej Karpathy, who joined Anthropic on 19 May 2026 — illustrated stipple portrait, dead centre of the corkboard
  • Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic — illustrated stipple portrait
  • Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI — illustrated stipple portrait
  • Jan Leike, formerly of OpenAI superalignment, now at Anthropic — illustrated stipple portrait
  • John Schulman, chief scientist at Thinking Machines Lab — illustrated stipple portrait
  • Murati
  • Ilya Sutskever, founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc. — illustrated stipple portrait
  • Barret Zoph, who left Thinking Machines for OpenAI on 14 January 2026, the same day — illustrated stipple portrait. Holder of the Golden Boomerang № 2.01
  • Noam Shazeer, who returned to Google for $2.7bn via Character.AI in August 2024 — illustrated stipple portrait
  • Tim Brooks, formerly Sora co-lead at OpenAI, now at Google DeepMind on world simulators — illustrated stipple portrait
  • Alexandr Wang, head of Meta Superintelligence Labs — illustrated stipple portrait

1 · The Boomerangs

Karpathy: OpenAI → Tesla → OpenAI → Eureka → Anthropic. Schulman: OpenAI → Anthropic → Thinking Machines. Zoph & Metz: OpenAI → Thinking Machines (Feb 2025) → back to OpenAI same calendar day, 14 January 2026. Shazeer: Google → Character.AI → back to Google for $2.7bn.

2 · The OpenAI Diaspora

Amodei sibs founded Anthropic out of OpenAI in 2021. Sutskever founded SSI (2024) at $32B with no product. Murati founded Thinking Machines (Feb 2025), seed round July 2025 at $12bn. Three competitors, all spun out of the same alumni list.

3 · The Safety Exodus

Jan Leike publicly resigned from OpenAI’s superalignment team on 15 May 2024, saying “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” Joined Anthropic 13 days later. Schulman followed three months after.

4 · Meta’s Raid

Alexandr Wang (Scale AI) leads Meta Superintelligence Labs with Nat Friedman (ex-GitHub) as a partner. Per BusinessInsider: 7 OpenAI researchers, 2 from DeepMind, 1 from Anthropic, 1 from Sesame. Per Sam Altman, on his brother’s podcast: “none of [our] best people” took the offer.

The full corkboard — threads, pins, tape and all — lives in the collectible edition of Issue №2.

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