Very few of the names stand out to me (being adjacently familiar with the space). However I did search based on your link… (Edit: with the exception of Chris Szegedy, thanks to the reply below for pointing that out)
Most of them seem to have been secondary/tertiary people on the projects listed. Definitely feels a bit like resume padding.
It’s also unfortunate that searching for the first person after Elon nets results for their domestic abuse arrest over any achievements in the space.
Further down, one of the only two women involved is a “creative AI writer/filmmaker”. Not a strong amount of diversity on their roster but also a weird role to highlight.
None of this is to diminish the work the people here do or have done, but it’s a startlingly high valuation for a company without high name recognition technical expertise in this domain.
Elon has traditionally relied on well known expert partners in the areas he’s expanded into, so this feels like an outlier.
Their founding team and first few after that are top top tier. Honestly some of the best engineers at DM. Unsurprising really given that he was offering ~$10M/year in comp.
There is at least one person there at the top of the Technical Team....I don't recognize from the scene, at least his name does not show as author or co-author in any ML papers I can remember reading...a certain Elon Musk.... :-)
Elon is a megalomaniac who fancies himself an engineer (yes he used to be one, but his with then is oft disparaged)
Even if he had the best names in the industry attached, he would always put himself first.
I don’t think it’s wrong he’d do so either , because he has a cult of personality that would make him the biggest feature (positive/negative) of any company he is involved with.
Hence why I specifically only ask for other people on note here.
Something surprising Sam Altman mentioned on the Lex Fridman podcast was that it only takes about 6 months to get a top physicist up to speed and productive researching AI.
So the team could largely be newbies to AI (with extremely good fundamental knowledge/skill), rather than folks we've all heard of from the AI scene.
Does Sam Altman have any relevant technical experience to make that assessment? Sounds like something someone would say that just lost their key technical team members.
For whatever it's worth, Scott Aaronson went from incisive skeptic to drooling fanboy in just about that long. Sam, likewise, seems prone to mistaking loyalty for expertise at this point in his career.
Jim Simmons that recently passed away did exactly this in finance decades ago. He didn't build a team of the brightest minds in finance.
He hired brilliant people that specifically did not work in finance. I think he even mentioned that astronomy was one of his favorite areas to hire from for finance.
I am sure we highly underestimate the indoctrination against new ideas that anyone at the top of a field has been subject to.
Humans love to turn everything into a high school prom king/queen popularity election though even when it is obvious the best people for the job didn't even go to the prom.
Structured finance is a math gig where the only constraint is legality. And as history shows, math nerds have no clue how to constrain the runaway damage their structured instruments can cause.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that AI development appears to be heading the same way.
> Our Series B funding round of $6 billion with participation from key investors including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, amongst others.
I’m curious what they’re bringing to the table to be able to fetch that valuation.