You have to feel a little bad for Ilya at this point. He, perhaps more than anyone, kicked off the current AI arms race by leaving DeepMind to join OpenAI back in 2015. He chose to stay during the first wave of departures for Anthropic, then launched a failed coup against Sam after realizing that he was not being "consistently candid". This eventually led to him getting kicked out of OpenAI, but instead of joining Anthropic like everyone else, he decided to start his own company that would not pursue product in the meanwhile. Now it's late 2026, and frontier models at both Anthropic and OpenAI are significantly accelerating internal research beyond what any single brilliant researcher can do. The age of heroes is ending. The machines Ilya helped bring into existence are rapidly obsoleting the skills that once gave him such leverage, and power is concentrating in the organizations that can bring industrial might to bear on the problem of how to make AI more powerful. And now Ilya is on the outside, just like the rest of us, watching the singularity happen without him.