> This is hilarious to me, in that the disgruntled departure just did a 180… how long until the next disgruntled spin-out for higher reasons chases the dollar too…

The cynic in me wants to ask "What makes you think his departure was because of an anti-commercialisation position?"

My take (probably just as wrong as everybody's else take) is that he saw the huge commercialisation potential and realised that he could make even more money by having a larger stake, which he got when he started his own venture.

Everybody in the chip business was a spin-off from Fairchild. This is pretty common when a huge, new tech comes along.

To be fair I think he had the same realization that they had at OpenAI. Sam Altman has gone on the record saying it's basically impossible to raise significant amounts of money as a pure nonprofit and you aren't going to train cutting edge foundation models without a lot of cash. Anthropic is saying they literally need to spend $1B over 18 months to train their next Claude version.

Also, to chase those dollars while being on the leash of Google’s massive investment.

So they lost the plot on the altruistic mission within months of setting up shop, and now are just a pawn in a bigger game between other companies.

The same thing happened back in the processor arms race days and before that in the IC days. Ex-Fairchild engineers created a lot of the most durable IC and chip companies out there. Intel's founders were ex-Fairchild.