I think the most important self-driving car company is Waymo, apparently founded as the Stanford Self-Driving Car Team in 2004, somehow became the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, the renamed Waymo in 2016.

All that is pretty long ago now and doesn't really have much connection to the SV "startup community" (Google ceased being meaningfully described as a "startup" a long, long time ago).

And anyway, I don't care about self-driving cars. Don't have one, don't particularly want one.

The direct benefits to me of OpenAI are nearly negligible. I use it (and others) now and then for various things but if it disappeared tomorrow, my life and work would not be meaningfully impacted.