Former Pebble CEO Joins OpenAI For Secretive Project

According to TechCrunch, Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of Pebble, has joined OpenAI to work on a confidential project. Cselle, who has been with OpenAI since October, shared the news on X, stating, 'Will share more about what I’m working on in due time. Learning a lot already.' Cselle is a seasoned entrepreneur, having sold his first company, reMail, to Google, and his second company, Namo Media, to Twitter before it was rebranded to X by Elon Musk. Nearly a decade ago, Cselle served as a group product manager at Twitter, focusing on the home timeline, user onboarding, and logged-out experiences. He left Twitter in 2016 to join Google, where he was a director at the Area 120 incubator for spin-offs. In 2022, Cselle began working on Pebble, initially called T2, with Michael Greer, former head of engineering at Discord. Pebble, a microblogging service emphasizing safety and moderation, developed a small but engaged community and received funding from investors including Android co-founder Rich Miner. However, Pebble struggled to achieve significant growth and shut down last October, later reemerging as a Mastodon instance in November. In May, Cselle joined the accelerator South Park Commons, where he worked on various generative AI prototypes, including a tribute to the viral HQ Trivia. Cselle's move to OpenAI coincides with another notable hire in the AI industry, as Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, announced the recruitment of Alex Rodrigues, founder of Embark. Rodrigues, who led the autonomous trucking firm through a SPAC merger in 2021 and its subsequent sale to Applied Intuition in 2023, will join Anthropic as an AI safety researcher.