The Call of the Frontier: AI’s Irresistible Pull
A curious pattern is emerging among people who have already achieved massive success in tech. Despite being wealthy and established, they are rolling up their sleeves again—driven, it seems, by a fear of missing out on artificial intelligence’s defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible allure of making potentially even more money.
High-Profile Moves to Anthropic
From Fintech to Frontier Models
Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced that he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team—not as an executive, but as a member of technical staff.
A Growing Trend
He’s not alone. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024. Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who went on to lead AI at Tesla and start his own company, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, framing the decision almost identically to Blomfield’s. Karpathy wrote that “the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be” remarkable.
Starting New AI Ventures
The SPAC King Goes All-In
Not everyone is joining someone else’s lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the “SPAC King” who has mostly stuck to boardrooms and all things “financial” since leaving Facebook in 2011, just took his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, his enterprise AI coding startup. He announced a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Wrote Palihapitiya on X: “I am convinced that what we are building now is” truly significant, “so there was no decision to make except to be all in.”
From Opendoor to Construction AI
Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023, launched NavigateAI, an AI “copilot” for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. Wu told TechCrunch directly on a recent call about his decision: “I knew if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something related to it, I would probably regret that.”
The “Member of Technical Staff” Phenomenon
The clearest sign of how keen these already-successful individuals are to work on AI might be the job title itself. “Member of technical staff” is the deliberately flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for nearly everyone on their technical teams, regardless of seniority. It’s the same title Blomfield is taking.
It’s also the title that Peter Bailis took this March, just months after becoming Workday’s CTO—a role overseeing AI strategy across an $8 billion-revenue business. Bailis lasted less than a year before stepping down for a spot at Anthropic.