What’s with the exodus from OpenAI?

The ChatGPT creator has seen many of its prominent executives and co-founders leave to join rivals, do their own thing, or in the case of Greg Brockman, just relax.

OpenAI may have been the first company to trigger a global race to build the best generative AI models after making its chatbot ChatGPT available to the public in November 2022, but a recent outflow of talent from its top brass indicates the company may be going through somewhat of an existential crisis.

Take last week, for example, when OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced his departure from the AI start-up to join rival Anthropic. In a note to colleagues, the research scientist said he wanted to focus on AI alignment – the study of how to build safe AI systems and ensure they do what they’re supposed to do – and start a new chapter of his career with more technical work.

“I’ve decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in,” Schulman wrote on X. “To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area. My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.”

But Schulman, who was one of 11 co-founders of OpenAI in late 2015 including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, isn’t the only high-level executive to jump ship and join rival Anthropic, the Amazon-backed creator of Claude. In May, former OpenAI executive Jan Leike also left the company to join Anthropic in a similar role.

Conflict of interest

Leike was one of the leaders of OpenAI’s superalignment team, which was dissolved after Leike and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned from the company earlier that month. Leike spoke out against the company shortly after resigning, claiming he disagreed with OpenAI’s leadership about the company’s core priorities “for some time” and that these issues had reached a “breaking point”.

“I believe much more of our bandwidth should be spent getting ready for the next generations of models, on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety, adversarial robustness, (super)alignment, confidentiality, societal impact and related topics,” he said at the time.

The dissatisfaction with OpenAI’s priorities seems to be a common refrain among those closely associated with it, including Musk – who left the company in 2018 after disagreements with the leadership. Earlier this year, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Altman for not sticking to the company’s original objective of developing AI for the benefit of humanity.

The lawsuit came amid reports OpenAI was planning to appoint several new board members within the next month after chaos at the upper echelons of the AI start-up last November, when Altman was briefly removed – and then reinstated – as CEO. At the time, the existing board was dissolved, and an interim board was appointed until permanent replacements were found.

“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit read. “Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI [artificial general intelligence] to maximise profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.”

Microsoft has been the biggest backer of OpenAI since ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2022. Last year, the company committed billions in investment to the AI start-up and integrated many of its tools with OpenAI models, including Bing and Copilot.

Last month, Microsoft decided to give up its observer seat on the board of OpenAI saying it has seen “significant progress” in the AI start-up and no longer feels it is necessary to hold one. This is in the context of ongoing antitrust scrutiny of its ties with OpenAI in the US.

‘Mission is far from complete’

Perhaps one of the biggest blows to OpenAI this year has been a sabbatical announcement by president and co-founder Greg Brockman, who said last week he is stepping back from the start-up for the rest of the year. “First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI nine years ago,” he wrote on X. “The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build.”

Andrej Karpathy, another co-founder of OpenAI, left the company in February to work on personal projects. Last month, he revealed a new company called Eureka Labs that will enable students to study a wide variety of subjects through its AI platform.

It remains to be seen how OpenAI performs amid such a reshuffling in its executive, but the San Francisco has scored some big talent wins to stay strong in the AI race, including the appointments of Sarah Friar and Kevin Weil to lead its finance and product teams respectively.

Friar, who is originally from Northern Ireland, joins OpenAI as its chief financial officer. Prior to her appointment, Friar was CEO of Nextdoor, a US social networking service for neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, chief product officer Weil was president of product and business at Planet Labs, an Earth imaging company based in San Francisco.

“Sarah and Kevin bring a depth of experience,” Altman said of their appointments in June, “that will enable OpenAI to scale our operations, set a strategy for the next phase of growth and ensure that our teams have the resources they need to continue to thrive.”

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