Exodus – we tracked 240 moves across companies to map the AI talent war

Name: Exodus – we tracked 240 moves across companies to map the AI talent war
Availability: InStock
Author: fabioperez

by fabioperez·Mar 3, 2026·1 point·0 comments

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AI Analysis

●●SolidRabbit HoleSolve My Problem

Charts OpenAI's $450B alumni ecosystem without novel analysis or surprising methodology.

Strengths

•Sankey visualizations + timeline filtering make talent flow patterns clickable and explorable
•240+ entries sourced and verified against published records—real curation work
•Identifies concrete patterns (Google/DeepMind brain drain, xAI departures) worth tracking

Weaknesses

•LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and specialist recruitment platforms track similar moves—no defensible moat
•Relies on manual sourcing and AI-powered tagging; unclear how reproducibility or ongoing maintenance scales

Post Description

Hey HN,

Exodus tracks who's leaving the big AI companies, where they're going, and what they're building. 240+ moves, 80+ companies, every entry sourced.

I used AI to track these after noticing the same pattern every week: someone leaves OpenAI, someone leaves Anthropic, a new startup appears, they get funded week later. A few things stood out:

- Google/DeepMind lost 58 people and got 13 back - OpenAI alumni founded 18 startups worth $450B+ (TechCrunch calls them "The OpenAI Mafia") - Half of xAI's co-founding team walked out - Apple feeds Meta, Meta feeds OpenAI — there's a whole food chain

You can filter by company, role, seniority, or time period. There's a Sankey diagram and a brain drain chart.

The curation pipeline uses the same system I run for https://7min.ai. Every entry is checked against published sources.

Are we missing any patterns?