新实验室为何崛起

Dear readers, After the launch of GPT-6 Astra, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared on X: 'AGI has arrived. OpenAI president Greg Brockman called the model a turning point and welcomed humanity to the 'AGI era'.

What exactly the two men mean isn't clear, since there's no agreed-upon definition of AGI. The message comes through anyway: an extremely powerful AI, possibly a self-improving one, is imminent and the path is mapped out.

Many of the people who built today's systems apparently see things differently. Dozens have left the big labs to start their own. Ilya Sutskever co-founded OpenAI and served as its chief scientist; now he's building Safe Superintelligence.

Jerry Tworek led the development of OpenAI's reasoning models and now runs Core Automation. David Silver, the mind behind AlphaGo, left Google DeepMind for Ineffable Intelligence. Yann LeCun left Meta after twelve years and founded AMI.

Jeff Dean spent 27 years at Google, most recently as chief scientist, and started Discovery Loop. The money follows: Nvidia invested in SSI in July, reportedly five billion dollars according to Bloomberg. The lab hasn't released a single model or paper.

Prometheus, Jeff Bezos' industrial AI lab, pulled in twelve billion dollars at a 41 billion valuation in June. Flapping Airplanes has no public model either and raised one billion dollars in an October Series A. The motives are mixed, and not all technical.

At these valuations, founders become paper billionaires fast. LeCun left after a strategy dispute with Meta. Sutskever wants to do research without product pressure. Others want to carve out a niche that would be a sideshow at a big lab.

Some departures aren't even a clean break: Google itself is a founding investor in Discovery Loop. What many founders share is a doubt. Not about whether much more powerful AI is coming; some think AGI is close.

Their doubt is about whether today's recipe alone gets there: ever-larger language models, trained on internet data, refined with reinforcement learning. What is a neolab? There's no official definition.

We use the term for independently founded, research-driven AI companies that build their business around a long-term technical bet. They want to change how AI learns, perceives the world, solves problems, is controlled, or computes.

The current wave became visible in 2024. The race for the strongest models was in full swing, and the cloud giants had their partners: Microsoft backed OpenAI, Amazon backed Anthropic.

Then Sutskever founded SSI in June and raised a billion dollars within months for a research team with no product. There's a reason investors fund that.

OpenAI and Anthropic have grown into corporations on the back of their success, and both are pursuing IPOs at record valuations. Internally, research teams compete with product teams for money and attention.

Established companies struggle with ideas that threaten their business, management scholars call this the innovator's dilemma. That's what investors are betting on: a small team finds what the giants miss. There are precedents.

The Transformer was invented at Google in 2017. DeepMind beat the world's best Go players with AlphaGo. Yet the AI assistant for the masses came from OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit in 2015.

The second breakout came from an OpenAI spinoff: Dario and Daniela Amodei founded Anthropic in 2021. By the end of July 2026, Bloomberg pegged its annualized revenue at over 65 billion dollars.

The real bet neolabs are making is on research gaps the big players don't fill, either because nobody knows the path or because nobody allocates resources for it.

The big labs have more compute, established data pipelines, and feedback from hundreds of millions of users. What a small lab builds can show up at the market leader shortly after the first product ships. TypeSafe AI shows how short a lead can be.

In mid-September it launched Jev, a decision model. Two weeks later, OpenAI announced its Decisions API.