OpenAI keeps losing executives. Here's everyone who left so far this year
OpenAI may be winning the current artificial intelligence boom — but it’s losing top-level executives.
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, announced on Wednesday that she had “made the difficult decision” to leave the AI startup after six-and-a-half years.
“There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes,” Murati said, “yet this moment feels right.” After OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman was briefly ousted in November, Murati served as interim leader of the company.
Along with Murati, OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew and vice president of research Barret Zoph also announced their resignations from the company.
The departures come four months after OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, resigned from the company. Sutskever, who co-led the startup’s “superalignment” team focused on AI’s existential dangers, was joined by his co-lead, Jan Leike, who also resigned in May.
“Leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially companies that grow so quickly and are so demanding,” Altman wrote on X in response to the departures. “I obviously won’t pretend it’s natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal company, and I think the reasons Mira explained to me (there is never a good time, anything not abrupt would have leaked, and she wanted to do this while OpenAI was in an upswing) make sense.”
Here’s a list of OpenAI executives who have left the company so far this year.
Mira Murati — Chief Technology Officer
In her statement about leaving OpenAI, Murati said she wants “to create the time and space to do my own exploration.”
Murati also thanked Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman “for their trust in me to lead the technical organization and for their support throughout the years.” She also noted the startup’s recent releases of speech-to-speech capability and its latest model series, OpenAI o1, which the company says can “reason” through more complex tasks and problems in science, coding, and math than the startup’s earlier models could.
In March, Murati told The Wall Street Journal (NWS) that OpenAI’s text-to-video generator, Sora, would be publicly released “definitely this year.” Murati said she wasn’t sure if nudity would be allowed in Sora’s generations — worrying some experts in favor of regulating similar AI tools before being widely released.
Bob McGrew — Chief Research Officer
Hours after Murati, McGrew also announced he was leaving the startup after eight years.
“I’m immensely proud of the work that our research team has done over these years, from our early achievements in RL to pioneering LLMs to building the first multimodal generative models to transforming the world with ChatGPT,” McGrew wrote in a statement.
McGrew said he was taking a break, but that he would continue supporting the new lead of OpenAI’s research team, Mark Chen, and the rest of the team for the next two months.
Altman wrote on X (META) that Chen’s takeover of McGrew’s position “has been our long-term succession plan for Bob someday; although it’s happening sooner than we thought.”
Barret Zoph — Vice President of Research
Zoph, who joined OpenAI “right before” it launched ChatGPT, announced that his decision to leave was “very difficult,” but that it was personal, and “feels like a natural point for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI.”
The now-former vice president of post-training research thanked McGrew and said he was grateful for support from Altman and Brockman during his time at the startup.
Ilya Sutskever — Chief Scientist
Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI in May — almost six months after taking part in an effort to oust Altman from his leadership position.
After almost a decade at the company he co-founded with Altman and others, Sutskever said he was “confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial” under its remaining leaders.
Sutskever co-led OpenAI’s “superalignment” team, which was responsible for researching AI’s existential dangers. His co-lead, Jan Leike, resigned shortly after he did. OpenAI disbanded the “superalignment” team after Sutskever and Leike left.
Now, Sutskever is the co-founder of another AI startup called Safe Superintelligence (SSI), and Leike is a machine learning researcher at OpenAI rival, Anthropic.
Andrej Karpathy — Co-founder
Karpathy left OpenAI for the second time in February, after rejoining the previous February. The leading AI researcher and co-founder of OpenAI said in his resignation announcement that “nothing ‘happened’ and it’s not a result of any particular event, issue or drama.”
Before rejoining OpenAI, Karpathy served as director of AI at Tesla (TSLA) from 2017 to 2022. He is now building Eureka Labs, which calls itself “a new kind of school that is AI native.”
