Staff changes are underway at OpenAI as a growing number of leaders leave the company.
On Monday, co-founder and ChatGPT leader John Schulman announced he was leaving OpenAI for rival AI company Anthropic.
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Hours later, co-founder and president Greg Brockman said he was taking a leave of absence through the end of the year, and VP of product Peter Deng also left OpenAI, according to The Information.
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The personnel triple whammy comes on the heels of other high-profile departures from OpenAI amid reported disagreements over the company’s mission and safety efforts: OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned in May, days after safety lead Jan Reicke, who worked under Sutskever, resigned after publicly criticizing OpenAI over X and saying that “safety culture and safety processes were taking a backseat to flashy products.”
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Sutskever publicly stated that his decision to leave OpenAI was to focus on “projects that are very meaningful to me personally,” but the internet quickly began speculating that his departure was prompted by Sutskever’s attempt to fire CEO Sam Altman, reportedly led by Sutskever over his opposition to Altman’s prioritization of profits over safety.
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Schulman has publicly expressed a similar stance, explaining that his decision to leave Open AI was for personal growth: “I decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic because I believe it will allow me to gain new perspectives and work with people who are deeply engaged in the topics I care about most,” Schulman said. “To be clear, I am not leaving due to a lack of support for alignment research at Open AI. My decision is personal and based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.”
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The sole reason for Brockman’s decision to take time off was that he was “relaxing for the first time since co-founding OpenAI nine years ago.”
Of course, all of this could simply be that OpenAI’s leaders are stepping down and taking a break after years of accomplishments and hard work, as OpenAI enters a new era. But the timing of the departure cannot be ignored. First, there’s Altman’s actions: the former OpenAI board of directors fired Altman for “blatant lies,” and then there was the Scarlett Johansson furore.
Additionally, ChatGPT has huge operating costs. Rivals are catching up, and while some, like Meta, offer free open-source models, there’s been no news on GPT-5. Combine these issues with a very bad day for tech stocks on Wall Street and Goldman Sachs’ bearish view of generative AI, and it starts to look like those leaving OpenAI saw the early signs that the AI bubble was about to burst.
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That said, there’s still a lot to look forward to in the OpenAI pipeline: Their search engine prototype SearchGPT is on the way, and their AI video generator Sora awaits public release, so even without the OpenAI veterans, a splashy release could reignite interest and market demand. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Mashable has reached out to OpenAI about the significance of the personnel changes and will update if we hear back.
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Artificial Intelligence OpenAI