OpenAI has been around for less than nine years, but eight of its 11 co-founders have left the organization, with some joining rival companies.
On August 6, Greg Brockman, President of OpenAI and one of the 11 co-founders, announced on X that he would take a long-term leave of absence until the end of the year. On the same day, another co-founder who played a key role in the company, John Schuman, also announced his resignation and moved to Anthropic - a strong rival of OpenAI. Meanwhile, Peter Deng, in charge of product, who worked at Meta, Uber and Airtable, also left the company after a year of joining.
According to TechCrunch, there are currently only three co-founders working at OpenAI. The continuous departure of key personnel shows a crisis at the top of the world's most prestigious AI startup.
"It was a difficult decision to leave OpenAI," John Schuman, principal architect of ChatGPT, said in a statement on X on August 6. "I want to focus more deeply on AI and start a new chapter in my career at Anthropic, where I can gain new perspectives, research, and experiment with my deep bench of teammates and topics that interest me." Schuman said he was proud of what he had done at OpenAI and would continue to support his former colleagues.
In May, Jan Leike, a senior co-lead of OpenAI's Superalignment project, also made a brief statement on X: "I am resigning." He later joined Anthropic.
Leike's departure came just hours after Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder who once tried to oust CEO Sam Altman, left OpenAI. Other co-founders, Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders, had also left.
According to Business Insider, after the lightning coup last year, Sam Altman quickly returned to the company's management, but since then, OpenAI's senior management has not stabilized.
Most of those who left believe that OpenAI has lost sight of its original mission, focusing on products that make money quickly rather than caring about developing AI responsibly.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk, one of OpenAI's co-founders, continued to file a lawsuit against Sam Altman and the company. The billionaire believes that Altman put commercial interests above the interests of the community. He was lured by Altman and Brockman to co-create the company with the promise that "it would go in a safer and more open direction than the profit-driven tech giants." After participating and investing millions of dollars, Musk felt betrayed because Altman and others joined Microsoft to establish a network of OpenAI subsidiaries and operate for profit.