TL;DR:
- OpenAI has hired Gabor Cselle, former CEO and co-founder of Twitter challenger Pebble, for a secretive project, with Cselle joining the company in October 2024.
- Cselle is a serial entrepreneur who previously sold startups to Google and Twitter, and has experience working at Twitter as a group product manager.
- Pebble, Cselle’s previous venture, was a microblogging service focused on safety and moderation but struggled to maintain growth and shut down in October 2023.
- The hiring coincides with OpenAI’s rival Anthropic recruiting Alex Rodrigues, founder of autonomous trucking firm Embark, as an AI safety researcher.
OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence research company, has recently hired Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of Pebble, to work on a confidential project. Cselle, who joined OpenAI in October 2024, announced his new role in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday, expressing his excitement about the learning opportunities at his new workplace. “Will share more about what I’m working on in due time,” he wrote. “Learning a lot already.”
Cselle is a serial entrepreneur with a successful track record in the tech industry. He sold his first company, reMail, a mobile email startup incubated by Y Combinator, to Google. His second venture, Namo Media, a native advertising startup, was acquired by Twitter before Elon Musk’s takeover and rebranding of the social network as X.
Prior to his entrepreneurial journey, Cselle worked at Twitter nearly a decade ago as a group product manager, overseeing the home timeline, user onboarding, and logged-out experiences. In 2016, he left Twitter to join Google as a director at Area 120, the tech giant’s incubator for spin-offs.
In 2022, Cselle co-founded Pebble with Michael Greer, the former engineering head at Discord. Pebble, a microblogging service that emphasized safety and moderation, initially gained traction and secured funding from investors like Android co-founder Rich Miner. However, the company struggled to maintain significant growth and eventually shut down in October 2023, later reemerging as a Mastodon instance.
Before joining OpenAI, Cselle was part of the accelerator South Park Commons, where he worked on various generative AI prototypes, including a tribute to the popular HQ Trivia game.
Cselle’s hiring announcement coincides with another high-profile recruitment by OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic. Alex Rodrigues, the founder of autonomous trucking firm Embark, which went through a SPAC merger in 2021 and a subsequent fire sale to Applied Intuition in 2023, revealed on Friday that he would be joining Anthropic as an AI safety researcher.
As OpenAI and other AI companies continue to attract top talent from diverse backgrounds, the industry eagerly awaits the groundbreaking developments that will emerge from their collaborative efforts. Cselle’s expertise and entrepreneurial experience are expected to contribute significantly to OpenAI’s ongoing research and innovation in the field of artificial intelligence.
