After a Year as an Independent Creator, Cova Joins OpenAI
The rise of the creator-tech hire.
On September 2, 2026, Cole Lee, a Stanford computer science graduate known online as @covacut, announced on X that she was joining OpenAI. She joins its Developer Experience team. For the past year, she worked as an independent creative-technology creator, building an audience of over 372,000 on Instagram.
Before the announcement, Cole was working with OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind, along with brands like Notion and Instagram. She built Taz, a real-time companion that saves your thoughts as you think out loud, on OpenAI’s Realtime API. Weeks after the announcement, she launched movingimagearchive.com, a free archive of more than 120,000 public-domain film clips dating back to 1894. In her own words, the job is telling the stories that “expand who gets to imagine and what becomes possible.” She has said that when machines can build almost anything, distribution and storytelling become the hard part.
As AI makes it cheaper to build a good product, the hard part becomes getting people to care. Ramp is paying up to $350,000 for a Head of Content to run its whole media operation. In April, OpenAI bought TBPN, the daily tech talk show, its first acquisition of a media company. Companies no longer just want distribution. They want creators documenting the company in a way audiences trust.