Many talented folks are leaving their big-tech dream jobs to cash in on the AI wave, building companies that are now worth billions, and that too, in less than a year! “The founders of OpenAI, Cohere, and Anthropic left Google to build what that company wouldn’t,” said Vin Vashishta, the founder of V-Square, said.

“Inside of every great company is the company that replaces it,” he noted.  

The same was true for Inflection, Character.AI, and even the recent Mistral, where the founders left Google DeepMind, Meta, and OpenAI, to build their own startups. 

Kai-Fu Lee, a computer scientist who has previously worked at Google, Microsoft, and Apple, has also started 01.AI, his own AI startup. Now, the eight-month-old Chinese startup has reached a valuation of $1 billion, and became one of the fastest unicorns, joining the list of Avant, iCarbonX, NuCom Group, which became unicorns in less than six months. 

The latest funding round included Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s cloud unit as well. 

Interestingly, 01.AI has open sourced its foundational LLM called Yi-34B, which outperforms Llama 2 on various key metrics. Lee said that all he wanted to do was provide an alternative to Meta’s Llama 2, which has been “the gold standard and a big contribution to the open-source community”.

AI Hustle Culture  

A Carnegie Mellon University graduate, Lee is also the CEO of Sinovation Ventures. At 01.AI, he has built a team of more than 100 people, which includes his former colleagues from US companies, and other Chinese nationals working overseas. He highlighted that his team not only includes AI specialists, but business experts as well. 

Lee mentioned that he has received inquiries from the limited partners of his venture firm regarding how he will manage his dual CEO roles. He emphasised that if he dedicates 40-hours a week to Sinovation, he still has an additional 128 hours per week at his disposal. 

“I have 86 more hours to allocate to 01.AI without neglecting my Sinovation responsibilities,”  he added, suggesting that he might allocate six hours each day for sleep and other aspects of his life. This sounds in line with Narayana Murthy’s vision of developed countries, and its founders, who are working 70+ hours a week.

Lee’s involvement in AI spans several decades. In his 1982 application to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, he expressed his desire to commit his life to AI research, believing that this technology would facilitate a deeper understanding of humanity. 

“Necessity is the mother of innovation, and there’s clearly huge necessity in China,” said Lee. He highlighted that OpenAI and Google’s models are not available in China, and that is driving innovators in the country to build their own models. This also includes big companies such as Baidu.

Even then, Lee mentioned, “Our proprietary model will be benchmarked against GPT-4,” in reference to OpenAI’s LLM.

Creating jobs

Apart from voluntarily leaving jobs for their own startups, big-tech employees are also being laid off at a rapid pace. When not starting their own companies, these skilled employees are joining these startups. Post-Covid, the high attrition and massive layoffs could be attributed to the shift from WFH to office, among many other reasons, but now the case is more about building AI startups. 

According to Vinod Khosla, the businessman and VC, a lot of former Google, Meta, and Microsoft employees have been approaching him for funding, and a lot of them are mostly companies that are focused on AI. He believes that it is because they have a lot of passion to build what they want, and the big-tech is not delivering it. 

“Bad times for big tech is a great time for startups that you’ll hear about five years from now,” Khosla said. Though big-tech is also allocating most of its fund for AI projects, employees want to get to it faster, and also get a bigger payout after they succeed, not just mere salaries. 

Of course, the journey from being a big-tech employee to a billionaire, or a millionaire is not without challenges. And a lot of these startups are still on the way. But they seem to be only headed upwards and onwards. Interestingly, a lot of these AI startups are also employing the people who are being laid off from the big-tech.

That also explains why big tech is regulating open source, but that conversation is for another day.