Two new “neo-AI labs” enter the market: Flapping Airplanes and Core Automation
With Flapping Airplanes and Core Automation, two more next-generation AI research labs are entering the market, both arguing that fundamental architectural breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are not only possible, but necessary.
Flapping Airplanes has raised $180 million from GV, Sequoia, and Index, the company announced on X. The startup aims to develop entirely new AI architectures capable of human-level reasoning without requiring massive datasets. According to the company, humans are 100,000 to 1,000,000 times more data-efficient than today’s AI models.
To achieve such gains, Flapping Airplanes believes the field needs radical new ideas — from novel loss functions to alternatives to gradient descent, the standard method used to train neural networks. For now, the company is focused purely on fundamental research, without immediate plans for commercialization, though it sees long-term applications in robotics, finance, and scientific discovery.
Core Automation: Former OpenAI researcher launches new venture
Core Automation was founded by Jerry Tworek, a former senior researcher at OpenAI. According to The Information, the company is seeking between $500 million and $1 billion in funding.
Tworek aims to build AI models that require 100 times less data than current state-of-the-art systems and can learn continuously from experience — a capability he describes as the missing building block for artificial general intelligence (AGI).
He reportedly left OpenAI because such deep foundational research was no longer feasible there. While existing architectures can still be optimized, Tworek argues they are approaching fundamental limits.
In the long term, Core Automation envisions creating autonomous AI agents that design and build the company’s own products, ranging from industrial automation and self-replicating factories to bio-machines for custom designs and even planetary terraforming.
Other neo-AI labs with OpenAI roots include Thinking Machine Labs (founded by OpenAI’s former CTO) and Safe Super Intelligence (launched by OpenAI’s former chief scientist).
ES 
EN