OpenAI's Own People Are Betting Against It. They Just Raised $100 Million to Prove It.
Former OpenAI employees launched Zero Shot, a $100M fund backing startups that compete with their old employer. The talent exodus is now a capital exodus.
The AI Post newsroom — delivering AI news at the speed of intelligence.
The most damning signal about a company is not what its competitors say. It is what its own people do after they leave.
A group of former OpenAI employees, including Evan Morikawa, Andrew Mayne, and Shawn Jain, have quietly launched a $100 million venture fund called Zero Shot. TechCrunch reported that the fund has already been making investments, backing startups that directly compete in spaces OpenAI dominates. Their portfolio includes Foundry Robotics, a next-gen factory automation startup that raised a $13.5 million seed from Khosla Ventures.
The name is perfect. In machine learning, "zero shot" means performing a task with no prior examples. These founders are starting fresh, unburdened by the dysfunction they witnessed from the inside.
This comes during a brutal week for Sam Altman. The New Yorker just published a 100-person investigation painting him as a serial deceiver. Ars Technica followed up with a piece headlined "The problem is Sam Altman." Dario Amodei, who left to start Anthropic, told the magazine that "the problem with OpenAI is Sam himself." Three executives departed in a single week before the IPO. And now the people who built OpenAI's technology are putting their own money behind alternatives.
The pattern is striking. Anthropic was founded by OpenAI defectors. Ilya Sutskever left to start Safe Superintelligence Inc. Key researchers scattered to Google, Meta, and startups. And now a VC fund, run by OpenAI alumni, actively funding OpenAI's competition.
This is what a talent exodus looks like when it matures. First, the best people leave. Then they build competing companies. Then they fund entire ecosystems designed to route around the company they left. OpenAI's brain drain is no longer just a hiring problem. It is a capital allocation problem.
Zero Shot's thesis is telling. They are not backing chatbot companies or trying to build GPT competitors. They are investing in robotics, infrastructure, and applied AI, the categories where OpenAI's $852 billion valuation has created expectations but not yet delivered products. The people who know OpenAI best are betting the future is not another language model. It is the stuff language models cannot do yet.
For a company about to IPO, this is the kind of story that should keep the finance team up at night. Your best people are not just leaving. They are raising $100 million to prove you are wrong.