OpenAI Plugs the Holes In its $1 Billion App-Developer Business

Before we get to OpenAI’s new products for customers of its artificial intelligence models, we wanted to flag the plans of Barret Zoph, one of three key technical leaders who unexpectedly resigned last week.

Zoph previously led the OpenAI team responsible for preparing AI models for release, known as post-training, and has told people that he plans to start a new company, my colleagues Erin and Jon reported.

It’s not clear yet what the startup will do, or if the departing CTO, Mira Murati, will join him, but I don’t think he’ll have any trouble raising capital. Silicon Valley investors are dying to back highly-acclaimed researchers like Zoph. See: the $1 billion round that Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist and cofounder, raised last month for his brand-new AI startup.

Given how much money OpenAI’s rivals like Microsoft and Google are throwing at bona fide AI talent that struck out on their own (see: deals involving Inflection and Character), investors can probably rest easy knowing there’s an exit path with some, if limited, return.

On to today’s issue… 

For businesses that rely on OpenAI’s technology for their apps and collectively spend more than $1 billion a year on it, yesterday’s OpenAI Dev Day may have felt like a bit of a letdown, even though the company lowered expectations ahead of the event.

That’s because OpenAI launched a slew of new features to plug the holes in its developer products by making them cheaper to use and catch up to rivals such as Anthropic, which has stepped up its game this year.