OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a host of other major tech companies have found common ground in F/ai, a new startup accelerator based out of Paris. The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F/ai. On Tuesday, Station F announced it had partnered with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, which it says marks the first time the firms are all participating in a single accelerator. Other partners include cloud and semiconductor companies AWS, AMD, Qualcomm, and OVH Cloud.

Founders used to be wedded to their companies. Now, anyone can be lured away for the right price. Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI "acqui-hires" in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and fold its cofounders and research teams into DeepMind; and Nvidia wagered $20 billion on Groq's inference technology and hired its CEO and other staffers. The frontier AI labs, meanwhile, have been playing a high stakes and seemingly never-ending game of talent musical chairs.

Leaders at Mira Murati's startup believe Barret Zoph engaged in an incident of "serious misconduct." The details are now coming to light. Leaders at Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab confronted the startup's cofounder and former CTO, Barret Zoph, over an alleged relationship with another employee last summer, WIRED has learned. That relationship was likely the alleged "misconduct" that has been mentioned in prior reporting, including by WIRED . To protect the privacy of the individuals involved, WIRED is not naming the employee in question.

Thinking Machines Lab, led by a group of prominent former OpenAI researchers, is betting that fine-tuning cutting-edge models will be the next frontier in AI. Thinking Machines Lab, a heavily funded startup cofounded by prominent researchers from OpenAI, has revealed its first product--a tool called Tinker that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models. "We believe [Tinker] will help empower researchers and developers to experiment with models and will make frontier capabilities much more accessible to all people," said Mira Murati, cofounder and CEO of Thinking Machines, in an interview with WIRED ahead of the announcement. Big companies and academic labs already fine-tune open source AI models to create new variants that are optimized for specific tasks, like solving math problems, drafting legal agreements, or answering medical questions. Typically, this work involves acquiring and managing clusters of GPUs and using various software tools to ensure that large-scale training runs are stable and efficient.

Mark Zuckerberg is on a warpath to recruit top talent in the AI field for his newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs. After trying to gut OpenAI (and successfully poaching several top researchers), he appears to have set his sights on his next target. More than a dozen people at Mira Murati's 50-person startup, Thinking Machines Lab, have been approached or received offers from the tech giant. One of those offers was more than 1 billion over a multi-year span, a source with knowledge of the negotiations tells WIRED. The rest were between 200 million and 500 million over a four-year span, multiple sources confirm.

Last September, Mira Murati unexpectedly left her job as chief technology officer of OpenAI, saying, "I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration." The rumor in Silicon Valley was that she was stepping down to start her own company. Today she announced that indeed she is the CEO of a new public benefit corporation called Thinking Machines Lab. Its mission is to develop top-notch AI with an eye toward making it useful and accessible. Murati believes there's a serious gap between rapidly advancing AI and the public's understanding of the technology.