Tech winners return to work in AI, leaving established roles

A pattern is emerging among people who have already achieved significant success in the tech industry, as they return to hands-on roles in artificial intelligence. Tom Blomfield, co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo, announced on Monday he is taking a leave of absence from Y Combinator to join Anthropic’s compute team as a member of technical staff. Other notable figures making similar moves include Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, who joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May. Not everyone is joining an existing lab; Chamath Palihapitiya, known as the “SPAC King,” took his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, an enterprise AI coding startup, announcing a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI “copilot” for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. The job title “member of technical staff,” used by Anthropic and OpenAI for nearly everyone on their technical teams, is the same title Blomfield is taking, and Peter Bailis also took that title in March after leaving his role as Workday’s CTO.

What’s reported

Key figures

Sources: TechCrunch