Tim Zaman Leaves Google DeepMind To Join OpenAI At An Interesting Time
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, April 2, 2025
Tim Zaman, who was once responsible for Google DeepMind's engineering and research productivity strategy, has left to work on developing "frontier clusters" at OpenAI.
OpenAI is building out a compute infrastructure, alongside its Microsoft cloud contract, mostly through the $500 billion Stargate joint venture.
The "Stargate" joint venture announced by President Trump is an initiative backed by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank aimed at improving U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and creating jobs.
"We're going to build and launch the largest (and most delightful) supercomputers to power frontier AI research," Zaman wrote on X. "DeepMind is obviously truly formidable and to the moon; and I had a great time - but I missed a smaller+tighter team I found in OpenAI <3."
In 2023, Zaman left Tesla to work at Google DeepMind. At Tesla, he headed "AI Infra" at the automotive company since 2019, and was involved in deploying the company's Dojo supercomputers and GPU supercomputers. He simultaneously spent one year at X as the head of machine-learning foundations.
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OpenAI on Monday announced it had closed a $40 billion funding round, the most raised by a private tech company. The deal reportedly values OpenAI at $300 billion, including the new capital.
The valuation names OpenAI behind only SpaceX at $350 billion and TikTok's parent ByteDance among the world’s most highly valued private companies, according to CB Insights.
The company expects about $18 billion of the funding to go toward OpenAI’s commitment to Stargate, CNBC reported, citing a source familiar with the fundings.
At the same time, in a series of posts Monday on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the popularity of the company’s new image-generation tool in ChatGPT will cause unspecified product delays in the near term.
“We are getting things under control, but you should expect new releases from OpenAI to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes be slow as we deal with capacity challenges,” Altman wrote. “Working as fast we can to really get stuff humming.”
OpenAI has launched a new image-generation ability to recreate content similar to Studio Ghibli’s hand-drawn animation.
Altman said the company had been trying to keep up and catch up since launch and that OpenAI's staff has worked late nights and through the weekend to keep the service online because of the number of users.
