OpenAI and Google are losing their top AI talent to startups even as cloud revenue booms

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The Motley Fool has a piece tracking a wave of senior AI talent leaving the big labs to start their own companies, using OpenAI's former COO Brad Lightcap and four top Alphabet engineers as the headline examples. Lightcap left days after a 7 billion dollar tender offer let OpenAI employees cash out shares, while Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le all departed Alphabet on the same day to found a new startup called Discovery Loop focused on automating scientific research

The same day those four left, Demis Hassabis also stepped back from running Google DeepMind, and the article notes that with his departure, all eight original authors of the 2017 Attention Is All You Need paper that introduced the transformer architecture have now left Google entirely. That is a pretty remarkable full circle moment for the paper that basically kicked off the current AI era

The article's actual investment argument is that cloud revenue growth at Microsoft, Amazon and Google is not the problem, Azure topped 100 billion in annual revenue with an 84% jump in commercial backlog, AWS grew 37% with its AI business surpassing 25 billion in run rate, and Google Cloud grew 82% with a 514 billion dollar backlog. The real question the piece raises is whether value ends up concentrated in that infrastructure layer or migrates up to the model and application layer where all this departing talent is now headed

SpaceX gets floated as the wildcard threat to the cloud incumbents, with Grok 4.6 having just launched, Grok 5 reportedly training on SpaceX engineering data, and a rumored 60 billion dollar acquisition of the coding platform Cursor possibly closing within days. The one thing SpaceX is missing according to the piece is an established cloud business to match AWS, Azure or Google Cloud

It closes with the standard Motley Fool stock pitch about their top 10 list, which is worth taking with a grain of salt. The underlying observation about talent flowing out of the big labs into new ventures while the labs themselves keep printing huge cloud numbers is a genuinely interesting tension though

The AI Platforms Are Real. The People Who Built Them Are Leaving.finance.yahoo.com