Meta, Google, OpenAI among Big Tech firms seeing top staff leaving to launch AI startups

Top researchers are jumping ship from Big Tech firms like Meta and Google to launch startups and raise huge funding rounds in the process, as investors bet big on the commercial potential of early-stage AI labs.Amid colossal spending on AI, many of these new startups are raising hundreds of millions within months of being founded. On Monday, former Google DeepMind researcher David Silver announced he'd raised a record $1.1 billion seed round for his months-old startup Ineffable Intelligence. Tim Rocktäschel, another former DeepMind employee, is reportedly raising up to $1 billion for his new startup Recursive Superintelligence. Rocktäschel didn't respond to a CNBC request for comment.AMI Labs announced a $1 billion raise in March, months after its founder, Yann LeCun, said he was leaving his role as Meta's AI chief. It's developing AI systems that can learn from continuous real-world data. In the past year, former staff at OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic and xAI also raised hundreds of millions from investors for months-old ventures, including AI labs Periodic Labs, Ricursive Intelligence and Humans&.Many of these companies have themselves hired extensively from the founders' former employers, and other AI giants, as investors have supplied them with the necessary funds to tempt top researchers from Big Tech.The race for AI dominance among the biggest AI labs has created an opening for smaller, more nimble companies, Elise Stern, managing director at French VC Eurazeo, which backed AMI Labs, told CNBC."When you're in a race, you narrow focus," she added. "That creates a vacuum. Entire areas of research, like new architectures, agents, interpretability and vertical models, are being deprioritised, not because they don't matter, but because they don't win the immediate race."

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