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Breaking news! OpenAI has another major personnel change, and three core figures have left at the same time

Wan Chen 2024/08/06

Summary

Is it starting to become difficult to lead the team?

Just as OpenAI’s pace was as amazing last year, it is as disappointing this year.

Sora is still a futures product, GPT-5 has not yet been disclosed, and the company has lost $5 billion in one year. Now, Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, who was Sam Altman’s close ally during last year’s “palace fight,” is on a long vacation.

In the latest organizational chart, Greg Brockman reports to CTO Mira Murati | Screenshot source: The Information

According to The Information, Greg Brockman, one of the 11 co-founders of OpenAI, is on a long-term leave; another co-founder and key leader, John Schulman, has jumped to Anthropic, a fierce competitor of OpenAI.

Peter Deng, the product chief who joined the company last year and previously led product at Meta Platforms, Uber and Airtable, has also left, according to a person with direct knowledge of the changes.

Regarding leaving, the two people at the center of the vortex also responded.

Greg Brockman told staff he planned to return after an extended vacation.

John Schulman shared on social media the reason why he chose to leave and join Anthropic: he hopes to conduct a deeper study on AI consistency, that is, the practice of making AI consistent with human values. (See John Schulman's internal statement at the end of the article)

He has been at OpenAI for 9 years, leading the post-training team for large models, and he recently took over the remaining staff of a team called the Super Alignment Safety Team, which focuses on preventing AI from causing social harm.

He had said he was reorganizing management after Sam Altman was fired and rehired last November, but the sudden departure of the three suggests that OpenAI's leadership has not yet stabilized. The changes come at a time when OpenAI's business is booming, while it is also facing significant losses and personnel changes.

OpenAI recently reassigned another safety chief, Aleksander Madry, to another position. Co-founder Ilya Sutskever recently left to found a startup. Another co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, left in February to start an education startup. OpenAI also recently hired its first chief financial officer and chief product officer, whose arrival may affect the role of Peter Deng, the product chief mentioned above.

P.S. John SchulmanX.comThe platform responded to the reasons for leaving OpenAI and choosing to join Anthropic. The original text is as follows:

I shared the following note with my OpenAI colleagues today:

I made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI.This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment and begin a new chapter in my career where I can return to hands-on technical work. I decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and conduct research with people who are deeply engaged in the topics that interest me most.To be clear, I am not leaving OpenAI due to a lack of support for alignment research. On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area.

I joined OpenAI right out of grad school and as part of the founding team about 9 years ago. This is the first and only company I've ever worked for, outside of an internship. It's been a lot of fun. I'm grateful to Sam and Greg for recruiting me in the beginning, and to Mira and Bob for believing in me, bringing great opportunities, and helping me succeed across a variety of challenges. I'm proud of what we've accomplished together at OpenAI;

I am confident that OpenAI and the team I am a part of will continue to thrive without me. Post-training is progressing well and has a deep bench of talented people. I can't give enough praise to ChatGPT - Barret has done an amazing job building the team into the incredibly competent operation it is now, along with Liam, Luke, and others. I'm excited to see the Alignment team come together with some promising projects. With the leadership of Mia, Boaz, and others, I believe the team is in very capable hands.

I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be part of such an important part of history, and I'm so proud of what we've accomplished together. I'll still be rooting for all of you, even if I'm working somewhere else.

编译原文：Trio of OpenAI Leaders Depart, Take Leave of Absence（Stephanie Palazzolo & Jon Victor，The Information）

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