Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of Pebble, recently announced his joining OpenAI to work on a mysterious, unrevealed project. This news was confirmed through his official post on the X platform (formerly Twitter).
According to LinkedIn, Cselle officially joined OpenAI in October this year. On social media, he stated: "I am currently learning a lot of new knowledge and will share more details about my project later."
As a serial entrepreneur, Cselle's career is quite legendary. His first company, the mobile email startup reMail supported by Y Combinator, was eventually acquired by Google. His native advertising company, Namo Media, was later acquired by Twitter, before Elon Musk took over and renamed it X.
It's worth noting that Cselle previously worked at Twitter as a product group manager, mainly responsible for core features such as the home timeline, user onboarding, and the experience for non-logged-in users. After leaving Twitter in 2016, he joined Google and became the head of the company's incubator, Area120.
In 2022, Cselle co-founded Pebble (originally named T2) with Michael Greer, the former engineering director of Discord. This microblogging platform emphasized security and content moderation, developed a small but very active user community, and received angel investments including from Rich Miner, co-founder of Android, but ultimately failed to achieve sustained growth. Pebble closed last October and transitioned to a Mastodon instance in November.
In May of this year, Cselle joined the accelerator South Park Commons and developed several generative AI prototypes during his tenure, including a project that paid homage to the once-popular HQ Trivia.
Meanwhile, OpenAI's competitor Anthropic also welcomed a significant figure: Alex Rodrigues, the founder of Embark. Rodrigues led the autonomous trucking company Embark to go public via SPAC in 2021, which was later acquired by Applied Intuition in 2023. He announced last Friday that he would join Anthropic as an AI safety researcher.
These career shifts of top executives reflect the ongoing heated competition for talent in the AI field and also suggest that more innovative projects may be on the horizon.