Here’s where OpenAI’s 11 cofounders are now

Research scientist Karpathy has had two stints working at OpenAI. The first time he left was in 2017, to join Tesla. He then boomeranged back to OpenAI in 2023, before leaving a year later to launch AI education startup Eureka Labs.

‎Vicki Cheung

Cheung left OpenAI in 2017 to join the ride-hailing firm Lyft after she spent two years as the startup’s head of infrastructure and a founding engineer. She is now the chief technology officer of the machine learning firm Gantry, which she cofounded with another former OpenAI researcher.

Elon Musk

The billionaire runs Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and he founded the AI startup xAI in 2023.

Musk sued OpenAI in February, accusing the ChatGPT maker of abandoning its founding mission. In a blog post OpenAI published after Musk sued the company, the ChatGPT maker said he left in February 2018. However, Musk’s lawyers argued in the first lawsuit that he “continued to make contributions to OpenAI” until mid-September 2020.

Musk dropped the lawsuit in June and then filed a fresh lawsuit in August, with his lawyers arguing he was “assiduously manipulated” by Altman and Brockman into cofounding OpenAI.

Pamela Vagata

Vagata is one of the lesser-known cofounders of OpenAI. Nor does she include the company on her LinkedIn profile.

However, she was listed as a founding member on an early version of the company’s website. According to her LinkedIn profile, she used to work at Facebook as an AI research engineer before joining Stripe as a software engineer in 2016. She left in 2019 as an AI tech lead. In 2021, she became a founding partner at venture capital firm Pebblebed.

Trevor Blackwell

Blackwell left the company in 2017. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is a roboticist and was a partner at Y Combinator until 2020. His personal website states that he’s “working on better ways to program robots.”

OpenAI and none of its 11 cofounders immediately responded to Business Insider’s requests for comment, made outside normal working hours.