AI

New ranking: Where OpenAI employees went to college

Team portrait of the Stanford University football team circa 1900.
Team portrait of the Stanford University football team circa 1900. Sports Studio Photos/Getty Images
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A chart circulating on X breaks down where OpenAI employees went to school. It reads like a who's who of elite universities.

Stanford leads by a wide margin, followed by UC Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon, with strong showings from Harvard, Cornell, UCLA, and a few international institutions.

The data comes from workforce.ai, which tracks and verifies online professional profiles to analyze hiring and talent trends.

While not a full picture of OpenAI's workforce, the snapshot underscores how heavily frontier AI labs continue to draw from a small cluster of top research universities — and how concentrated elite AI talent remains.

A chart showing where OpenAI employees when to college
A chart showing where OpenAI employees when to college  workforce.ai

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Alistair Barr, global tech editor of Business Insider, smiles at the camera while wearing a blue and white striped shirt.
Alistair Barr
Alistair Barr is the author of Business Insider's Tech Memo newsletter and the driving force behind the company's AI Insider franchise. Sign up here. Before that, he was Business Insider's Global Tech Editor and the Big Tech team leader at Bloomberg, following a reporting career at The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MarketWatch. Alistair covers all things Big Tech, along with startups and venture capital. He writes analysis and columns about topics including AI, cloud computing, data centers, semiconductors, online search, e-commerce, EVs, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.