In three years, the ecosystem of artificial intelligence has changed, no longer under the leadership of large historic companies, but by the massive dissemination of talents from Openai. From 2021 to 2025, around thirty former executives and researchers founded startups today evaluated at several tens of billions of dollars. Behind this wave the swarming of critical skills which recomposes the chessboard of the world AI.
A proliferation of projects, with exceptional valuations
Anthropic, founded by Dario and Daniela Amodei in 2021 after their departure from Openai, crystallizes this dynamic. The company, focused on the Sûreté de l’AG (artificial general intelligence), has reached a valuation of $ 61.5 billion in less than four years. In its wake, other equally ambitious projects emerge: SAFE Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), launched by Ilya Sutskever in May 2024 without product or income, raised $ 2 billion for an initial valuation of 32 billion. Thinking Machines LAB, directed by Mira Murati, reveals in 2025 a customizable AI project with funding of 2 billion from its launch.
This inflation of valuations, without anchoring on traditional metrics of commercial traction, testifies to a clear premium granted to the Openai experience. Investors bet on human capital even before technological capital.
Differentiated sectoral strategies
The Diaspora Openai is not limited to Act. It extends to various markets, redefining the contours of technological competition:
- Search engines : Perplexity, founded by Aravind Srinivas in 2022, offers an alternative doped at AI to the classic Google model. Supported by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, the company reaches $ 18 billion in valuation, despite controversies on the use of web content.
- Industrial and domestic robots : Covariant (Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan), Prosper Robotics (Shariq Hashme) and Daedalus (Jonas Schneider) attack the robotization of logistics and households.
- Education and intelligent agents : Eureka Labs (Andrej Karpathy) develops ia educational assistants. ADEPT (David Luan) designs tools for Knowledge Workers and now pilots IA agent efforts at Amazon.
- Climate neutralization : Living Carbon, co -founded by Maddie Hall, explores vegetable biotechnology to speed up the sequestration of CO₂.
Through these initiatives, the ex-Openai Mafia positions itself as a diffuse conglomerate, capable of competing with Big Tech on critical segments in less than a cycle of innovation.
An entrepreneurial dynamic based on fracture
If this generation of founders converges around AI, it mainly shares an origin: the break with Openai itself. Disagreements on governance, strategic divergences around the open source model and systems safety tensions are at the source of this brain leak.
The implications are major:
-
- Fragmentation of IA power centers : Technological domination will no longer be unipolar.
- Increased pressure on regulation : Governments will have to deal with a multitude of strategic actors, often opaque and transnational.
- Acceleration of innovation : The competition between these entities pushes to ever shorter development cycles.
The consequence of this burst is a rapid transformation of the overall landscape of artificial intelligence. Where a closed oligopoly was predicted (Google Deepmind, Openai, Anthropic), an archipelago of autonomous initiatives is emerging, interconnected by the circulation of talents and funding.
