OpenAI is suffering an exodus of senior talent
The newest departures leave OpenAI with only three of its 11 original cofounders.
Two high-level executives left OpenAI and its president temporarily stepped away in the latest leadership shakeup for a startup that has slowly shed its original team.
Along with its president Greg Brockman, who said he was taking a sabbatical, OpenAI also lost cofounder John Schulman, leaving it with just three of its 11 original founders, according to TechCrunch. OpenAI’s vice president of consumer product, Peter Deng, has also departed, The Information reported.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The high-level departures are the latest example of OpenAI shedding its top brass, especially after CEO Sam Altman returned to the company following his ouster by the board last November.
The schism between OpenAI’s nonprofit roots and its pivot to a focus on business caused dissonance at the company last year. That conflict reportedly split loyalties between Altman and Brockman’s camp, and that of cofounder and then-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and board member Helen Toner, according to journalist Kara Swisher.
The board successfully ousted Altman in November and Brockman said he was resigning from the company shortly afterwards, but Altman returned to OpenAI days later following pressure from investors and employees. Upon Altman’s return, the mostly technical and academic board members that ousted him were replaced by members with tech and business backgrounds. Sutskever was removed from the board, although he remained at the company, and Brockman returned as president.
In May, one of the main orchestrators of Altman’s ouster, Sutskever, left the company and later founded his own AI startup, Safe Superintelligence. Jan Leike, who with Sutskever co-led the “Superalignment” team at OpenAI that focused on making sure artificial intelligence does no harm, also left in May and now works for rival AI company Anthropic.
The departure of Schulman is particularly notable as he also joins Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s biggest competitors that’s backed by Amazon. In a post on X, Schulman said the move was “to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work.” AI alignment refers to making sure AI does no harm and works as expected.
“I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me,” Schulman wrote in the post.
Schulman worked at OpenAI for almost nine years and joined just after finishing a PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. He was instrumental in helping launch OpenAI’s landmark chatbot ChatGPT, which kickstarted an AI arms race after it was released in 2022.
In a post on X, Altman wished Schulman well in his future plans.
“You are a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about product and society, and mostly, you are a great friend to all of us,” he wrote.
OpenAI’s president, Brockman, also left the company for what he said in a post on X was a sabbatical through the end of the year.
“First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago,” Brockman wrote.
The departures put the spotlight once again on Altman, with some speculating on social media that he may be the reason employees are leaving. One of the biggest complaints from the previous board that led to Altman’s ouster was that he was not transparent.
Toner, the former board member who helped remove Altman, said in an interview with the TedAI podcast in May that Altman had misled the board “on multiple occasions” about its safety processes, the Financial Times reported. Among other issues, Altman reportedly did not inform the board about ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, according to Toner.
