48 direct researcher moves between frontier AI labs, January 2025 through August 2026, deduplicated from an open-web census of news coverage. Each ribbon is one lab-to-lab flow; one drifting particle per researcher. Hover a lab or a ribbon for the names behind it.
| Month | Researcher | Left | Joined | Role or specialty | Source |
|---|
Open-web census of press coverage of frontier-lab researcher moves, 2025-01 through 2026-08. Built from two compact high-confidence candidate tables (49 rows before deduplication) cross-checked against a corpus of 1,009 extracted source mentions; deduplicated to 48 distinct moves by 46 researchers, preserving sequential moves by the same person. A month is shown only when a contemporaneous source states or clearly implies it; otherwise it is marked unresolved. Year-extraction errors were corrected in favour of contemporaneous reporting (the Zoph, Metz and Schoenholz returns to OpenAI were January 2026; the Jumper and Shazeer departures were June 2026; Andrew Tulloch's move to Meta was October 2025). Moves involving non-frontier organisations (Sesame AI, Periodic Labs, Tencent, university posts) were cut; Karpathy's prior affiliation is reported both as OpenAI and his interim venture Eureka Labs. This census counts only publicly reported moves and may miss private or unreported ones.