A company is only as good as its employees. So, what happens to a company when its executive staff keeps leaving? According to a new report, two more employees just left OpenAI, and its co-founder is going on leave.
In the almost year since the massive shake-up at OpenAI that resulted in Sam Altman being ousted, we’ve been getting some worrying stories about the company. Until then, OpenAI seemed like a relatively drama-free company compared to other companies. Since then, however, the chrome paint has been peeling away from the company.
For example, there was the story about the company deprioritizing safety and focusing on “shiny products,” as stated by Jan Leike, a former Superalignment team leader. Also, there was a bombshell story about Sam Altman himself. The story painted him as being hard to work with and dishonest among other things.
Since the coup, we’ve also seen several top employees leave the company including Ilya Sutskever. Either people are leaving for bigger and better things or there’s something going on at OpenAI just waiting to get out to the public.
More top employees are leaving OpenAI
This next set of departures sees one of the co-founders of the company leaving. John Schulman is leaving OpenAI, and he’s leaving for Anthropic. He made a post on X about why he left the company.
In the post, it mentions that he wanted to “return to hands-on technical work,” so he might see more of that at the Amazon-backed company. “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.”
He then stated, “To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI.” That’s a bit odd to specify out of the blue. Not to be skeptical, but that’d make someone believe that this is the reason for his departure. In any case, he mentions that the company has been making investments to improve its alignment research.
Along with Schulman, Peter Deng, the VP for consumer product is also jumping ship. He left the company after only joining last year. He’s leaving to lead product development at both Uber and Meta.
A major OpenAI member is taking a break
Along with Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, another name tossed around during the big coup last year was Greg Brockman. He and Altman were all set to start a new AI company together during the whole ordeal. Well, he announced that he would be taking a leave from the company until the end of the year. In a post, he mentioned that it would be his first time to relax since founding OpenAI.
2024-08-06 15:04:46