OpenAI hires former Pebble Co-founder Gabor Cselle for 'secret project'

New Delhi: OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, has brought on Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of Pebble, a rival to X (formerly Twitter), to work on a "secret project." Cselle has been with OpenAI since October and expressed his enthusiasm on X, stating, "The talent density here is incredible. Learning a lot already."

Cselle co-founded Pebble in 2022, originally known as T2, alongside Michael Greer, a former engineering head at Discord. Despite raising funds from notable investors, including Android co-founder Rich Miner, Pebble announced its shutdown in 2023 after building a small community on its microblogging service. The platform later relaunched as a Mastodon instance called Pebble.social, reaching a peak of 20,000 registered users but struggling with daily activity.

In May, Cselle joined the South Park Commons accelerator, and his new role at OpenAI comes as the company prepares to launch its next AI model, 'Orion,' in December. This model is expected to be significantly more powerful than GPT-4, although its initial release will not be widely available through ChatGPT.

OpenAI is currently restructuring as a for-profit entity following a historic $6.6 billion funding round that valued the company at $157 billion, although there are no current plans to launch Orion.

With IANS inputs