Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of Pebble (a competitor of X), has joined OpenAI to work on an undisclosed project.
Cselle started working with OpenAI in October, saying on the X platform, “Excited to announce that I’ve joined @OpenAI! The skill density here is astounding. We are already learning a lot. I’ll tell you more about what I’m working on in due time.
Cselle is a repeat founder, having sold his first firm, reMail, a Y Combinator-backed mobile email startup, to Google. His second firm, native advertising startup Namo Media, was sold to Twitter before Elon Musk bought the social network and rebranded it as X.
He left Twitter in 2016 to return to Google, where he joined Area 120, the company’s incubator for experimental products and spinoffs.
He continued to spearhead creative projects there until 2022 when he co-founded Pebble, which aims to provide a more monitored, safe social media network.
Before his recent effort with OpenAI, Gabor Cselle worked with South Park Commons, an accelerator where he experimented with numerous generative AI ideas, including a tribute to the popular HQ Trivia game.
As OpenAI’s capabilities grow across industries, Cselle’s experience in product development and community participation could be critical.
This announcement coincides with OpenAI’s increased emphasis on user safety and responsible AI deployment, implying that Cselle’s work may be consistent with those aims.
Csell’s recruiting announcement comes on the same weekend that OpenAI rival Anthropic announces its own high-profile hire: Embark creator Alex Rodrigues.
We earlier reported that OpenAI expanded its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities, aiming to challenge Google’s decades-long supremacy in web search.
