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OpenAI Brain Drain Has Become Tech-World Meme Fodder

OpenAI Brain Drain Has Become Tech-World Meme Fodder
  • Mira Murati’s departure from OpenAI has sent shock waves through the tech sector.
  • Murati’s move follows a series of high-profile exits from OpenAI this year.
  • After her exit was announced, CEO Sam Altman disclosed two other departures from the research team.

Mira Murati’s departure from OpenAI — the latest in a series of high-profile exec losses at the ChatGPT maker — has sent shock waves through the tech sector.

There’s been rampant speculation about why Murati, who served as the chief technology officer and as the interim CEO after Sam Altman was briefly ousted in November, is leaving the company. A Bloomberg report said employees in Slack reacted to the news with a “WTF” emoji.

Then, of course, there are the memes on social media poking fun at the other big departures this year.

One venture capitalist joked that OpenAI lacked a C-suite.

Others pointed to a 2023 Wired magazine cover featuring Altman; Murati; Ilya Sutskever, a cofounder and now former chief scientist; and Greg Brockman, the company’s president and cofounder. The magazine described the OpenAI execs as the world’s “AI overlords.”

Of the four, only Altman and Brockman are still at the company, and Brockman is on extended leave through the end of the year. Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI in May and launched his own AI startup focused on safety.

The snark on X, meanwhile, has reached critical mass.

A few hours after Murati announced her departure, Altman announced two other OpenAI departures: Bob McGrew, the company’s chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, the vice president of research.

Left on the leadership team are Sarah Friar, the chief financial officer; Jakub Pachocki, who replaced Sutskever as chief scientist: Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer; and Kevin Weil, the chief product officer.

Of the 11 cofounders of OpenAI, only Altman, Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba remain.

One of the cofounders, Elon Musk, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. Musk dropped and then reopened the suit in August, saying he had believed he was helping start a nonprofit and had been “deceived.” In a statement in August, OpenAI told Business Insider: “As we said about Elon’s initial legal filing, which was subsequently withdrawn, Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves.”

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI on McGrew’s and Zoph’s departures.

The brain drain includes Jan Leike, a researcher and head of alignment who announced his resignation in May, shortly after Sutskever.

Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders, who worked on OpenAI’s governance and safety teams, left in the first half of the year.

The OpenAI cofounder John Schulman left in August to join a rival, Anthropic — where Leike also landed. Another cofounder, Andrej Karpathy, left in February.

In August, Kokotajlo said that about half of the people focused on AI safety had left the company.

“It’s not been like a coordinated thing,” he told Fortune. “I think it’s just people sort of individually giving up.”

OpenAI, which was founded in 2015, has been the dominant player in the AI race since it launched ChatGPT in late November 2022. It has since launched more sophisticated versions of ChatGPT, its DALL-E text-to-image model, and GPT-4o. The startup has also announced a voice assistant, a text-to-video model named Sora, and its most sophisticated AI model, o1, which the startup said could reason.

But rivals — including some OpenAI investors, like Microsoft — are catching up. On Wednesday, Meta said Meta AI was on track to be “the most-used AI assistant in the world.”

Bloomberg reported last week that OpenAI’s latest funding round — which would bring its valuation to $150 billion — was nearly complete and could include investors like Apple and Nvidia.

And Altman, according to Reuters and Bloomberg, could be in for a large payday with a company restructuring that would shift the startup away from its nonprofit status.

Correction: September 26, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated when Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders left OpenAI. They left in the first half of this year, not last year.


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