Survey ranks sub-$10B AI labs by talent density: Core Automation tops with 32 votes
FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-10-18
Frontier List published a community survey (73 voters, curated by Chris Barber) ranking "neolabs" valued under $10B by perceived talent density.
Top rankings by votes:
- Core Automation (32): founded by Jerry Tworek and Rohan Anil, 11-25 people, SF
- Periodic Labs (26): Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk, 51-100 people, Menlo Park
- Flapping Airplanes (20): Ben and Asher Spector et al., 11-25 people
- Standard Intelligence (18): Galen Mead and Devansh Pandey, 1-10 people
- Ricursive (8): Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini
The 5-vote tier includes David Silver's Ineffable and Recursive, whose founder list spans Richard Socher, Jeff Clune, Alexey Dosovitskiy and others. Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, Goodfire and Prime Intellect got 2-3 votes each; 18 more labs (Sakana AI, Isomorphic Labs, Factory, an ex-GDM text-diffusion lab, etc.) got one each. Thinking Machines and SSI were excluded for valuations above $10B.
Related event: Survey Names Core Automation Top Small AI Lab for Talent Density(2 posts)→
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