Three OpenAI executives leave firm, go on leave in latest shakeup

Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI and one of its 11 co-founders, revealed that he will be taking an extended leave of absence until the end of the year.

“I’m taking a break until the end of the year. First time off since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago,” Brockman wrote on X. “The mission is far from over; we still have an AGI of safe to build.”

Another co-founder, John Schulman, jumped ship to take a position at OpenAI rival Anthropic. Schulman helped lead the OpenAI team responsible for “post-training,” or efforts to refine the models in the large languages ​​that power ChatGPT.

A third product executive, Peter Deng, has also left, according to The Information, which noted that the exits appeared unrelated.

The post was referred to OpenAI for comment.

Schulman confirmed in a lengthy statement to X that he “had made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI.” He emphasized that the move was not related to any dispute over OpenAI’s work on “convergence” — an industry term for efforts to ensure that advanced AI will work safely for the benefit of humanity.

“To be clear, I’m not leaving because of the lack of support for extension search in OpenAI,” Schulman said. “On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this field.”

Altman responded with a message thanking Schulman for his work on OpenAI.

“You are a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about product and society, and most of all, you are a great friend to all of us,” Schulman said. “We will miss you immensely and we will make you proud of this country.”

OpenAI has faced some internal turmoil since last fall, when Altman was briefly ousted from the previous iteration of the firm’s board of directors — only to later return as part of a deal that included a major overhaul of the governing structure of the non-profit organization.

Brockman was ousted from OpenAI’s board and resigned as its president at the same time Altman was fired last November, though he also returned to his post as part of the restructuring.

Recently, Altman and his management team have faced criticism from former employees who allegedly pursued rapid product launches at the expense of security.

In May, OpenAI released its so-called “Superalignment” team, which was tasked with preventing outcomes that “could lead to human impotence or even human extinction.”

The team disbanded shortly after the two main executives, Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, announced their resignations from the company run by Sam Altman.

OpenAI later announced the creation of a new oversight committee to address security-related issues at the firm.