Hot AI Summer: What the Latest Talent Moves Mean in the Great Foundation Model Race

Seminal names including Andrej Karpathy, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper & Barret Zoph have changed horses at a key juncture. Here’s what insiders say is happening.

A year ago, Meta fired the starting pistol in an epic AI talent race when it brought on Scale’s Alexandr Wang and began throwing around nine-figure deals.

This year has seen an even higher-stakes shuffling of the deck as OpenAI and Anthropic head toward fall IPOs while SpaceX puts all its chips on Cursor to deliver stratospheric results.

Google meanwhile has lost people and fallen flat on the coding front, while Microsoft’s Satya Nadella tries on new and somewhat convoluted arguments about the Big Issues.

At Newcomer we’ve been tapping our sources and building a picture of where the industry is at during this pivotal moment.