But despite a faculty offer from Princeton straight out of the gate—a career fast track any one of our peers would have killed for—he was choosing to leave academia altogether to join a private research lab that no one had ever heard of. OpenAI was the brainchild of Silicon Valley tycoons Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, built with an astonishing initial investment of a billion dollars. It was a testament to how seriously Silicon Valley took the sudden rise of AI, and how eager its luminaries were to establish a foothold within it. Andrej would be joining its core team of
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