OpenAI Escape: Nine of Eleven Founders Abandon Ship
Since its founding in 2015, OpenAI has seen its founding team shrink dramatically. Today, among the original eleven members, only CEO Sam Altman and top researcher Wojciech Zaremba remained on the board of directors. The departure of John Schulman to join Anthropic and the recent departure of the president Greg Brockmanwhich occurred in early August, are only the latest episodes in a series of tumultuous internal changes.
Chaos within OpenAI erupted with the controversial firing of Sam Altman last November, followed by the CEO’s swift return just five days later. This event triggered a cascade of defections among leaders and key researchers. In May, the chief scientific officer Ilya Sutskever, who had supported Altman’s firing, left the company, only to return shortly thereafter. Jan Leike, one of OpenAI’s principal researchers, also left OpenAI in a dispute with management, and later moved to Anthropic.
In reality, the chain of layoffs had already begun with Elon Musk, one of the founders and initial financier, who left in 2018. Since then, the “rhythm” has never stopped: Pamela Vagata, Vicki Cheung and Trevor Blackwell followed in his footsteps, abandoning OpenAI and finding new outlets in the competition.
Now the future of ChatGPT’s mother is hanging by a thread. Investors are worried about the company’s stability, especially in the face of growing internal tensions and fierce competition from giants like Google and Anthropic.
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