Two founder factories: OpenAI and the Google–DeepMind orbit seeded most of the new AI labs since 2019

Asked:Chart which AI labs were founded by people who left which other labs — a founder family tree

A curated family tree of 15 major independent AI research and model labs founded 2019–2025, traced through 43 documented founder-career paths out of five parent research groups — OpenAI, Google AI/Brain, DeepMind, Meta AI/FAIR and Stability AI. Arrows mean founder career lineage, never corporate ownership or investment.

OpenAI Google AI / Google Brain DeepMind Meta AI / FAIR Stability AI line = one or more named founders left this lab before co-founding the new one; hover for names

Eight of Anthropic's co-founders left OpenAI in one wave in 2021 — the single largest documented founder exodus in this set. reuters.com

Mistral AI is the clearest mixed-lineage lab: Arthur Mensch came out of DeepMind while Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix came out of Meta AI/FAIR. en.wikipedia.org

Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas traversed all three big factories — OpenAI, Google Brain and DeepMind — before founding; he is one person with three prior research affiliations, not three founders. britannica.com

The pattern keeps running to 2025: Periodic Labs pairs OpenAI's Liam Fedus with DeepMind's Ekin Dogus Cubuk, and Thinking Machines Lab was founded by OpenAI's Mira Murati and Barret Zoph. techcrunch.com

The evidence, path by path

Left	Founded	Founder	Year	Source

Method: curated selection of major independent AI research/model labs founded 2019–2025, not an exhaustive census. Each row is one documented founder path — “left” means clear prior employment or research affiliation at the parent lab before co-founding. Arrows show founder career lineage only; acquisitions, investments and post-founding returns are not shown. Line width is uniform by design: raw cross-page founder counts contain duplicates and are not authoritative. Built from 77 extracted person-level rows curated down to 43 clean paths across 22 lab-to-lab links; noisy extraction artifacts (surname-only variants, collective names, misattributed staff) were dropped. Sources scanned through 2026-08-31.