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All the top OpenAI figures who have left since the 2023 attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman

All the top OpenAI figures who have left since the 2023 attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman

Alex Bitter

Mira Murati became one of the latest OpenAI leaders to leave the company on Wednesday.OpenAI

OpenAI has lost a slew of key leaders since last year's effort to push out CEO Sam Altman.
Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati became the latest high-profile employee to leave on Wednesday.

OpenAI has lost a lot of top talent over the last months.

The latest example came on Wednesday when Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said she would leave the company behind ChatGPT.

Shortly afterward, CEO Sam Altman said that two other executives, Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, would also leave OpenAI.

Altman said in a memo announcing McGrew's and Zoph's departures that "leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially companies that grow so quickly and are so demanding."

He added: "I obviously won't pretend it's natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal company."

Like many companies, OpenAI has seen turnover among its highest ranks since its founding in 2015. Cofounder Elon Musk left the company's board in 2018, for example.

But since an attempt to oust Altman as OpenAI's CEO last November, the company has lost multiple executives and key leaders.

Altman's attempted ouster involved some members of OpenAI's board as well as top company employees. Former board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, who left the board after the failed ouster, said that Altman had created "a toxic culture of lying."

Toner and McCauley have also pointed to a broader divide in OpenAI: Some employees, including many who have quit since November, have called for more independent oversight of companies developing AI technologies. Others believe companies like OpenAI can regulate themselves.

The departures have even become numerous enough to prompt memes on social media. OpenAI is also functioning without President Greg Brockman, who is on a leave of absence until the end of 2024.

Here are 10 leaders who have left OpenAI since the standoff last November:

Helen Toner

Helen Toner at the 2023 Vox Media Code Conference in Dana Point, California. Jerod Harris/Getty

Toner left OpenAI's board in November.

Since then, she has pointed in interviews to what she saw as Altman's transgressions and why she and others voted to oust him.

Toner's claims include that Altman didn't tell the board before OpenAI released ChatGPT. Instead, board members learned about the launch through Twitter, Toner told The TED AI Show. He also didn't tell the board the truth about OpenAI's ownership structure, she said.

Tasha McCauley

Tasha McCauley resigned from OpenAI's board in 2023. Randy Shropshire/Getty

McCauley left OpenAI's board at the same time as Toner, OpenAI said in a statement last November. They were the only women on the company's board.

In May, McCauley and Toner wrote an op-ed in The Economist. In part, they pointed to Altman's reinstatement to the board and "the departure of senior safety-focused talent" — an apparent nod to two major resignations earlier in the month — as evidence that OpenAI can't regulate itself.

Andrej Karpathy

Karpathy is a co-founder of OpenAI. San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images/Contributor/Getty Images

Karpathy announced his departure from OpenAI on X in February.

"First of all nothing 'happened' and it's not a result of any particular event, issue or drama," he wrote at the time.

"Actually, being at OpenAI over the last ~year has been really great," he added. Karpathy has since founded Eureka Labs, an AI company focused on education.

Karpathy started at OpenAI in 2015 as a founding research scientist, making him a co-founder of the company. He left in 2017 for a job at Tesla, according to his website. He came back to OpenAI in 2023.

Jan Leike

Leike announced his departure from OpenAI in a series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, in May. That month, he took a job as a co-lead of Anthropic's alignment science team.

At OpenAI, Leike was co-head of the company's Superalignment team. Leike and co-founder Ilya Sutskever had been charged by OpenAI with leading a team to figure out how to keep AI safe for humans to use. The goal of the Superalignment team is to "ensure AI systems much smarter than humans follow human intent," according to a post on OpenAI's website from last year.

While he praised his team in the posts, he also said: "I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company's core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point."

He added in a subsequent post that "over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products."

Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever cofounded OpenAI and helped build ChatGPT. JACK GUEZ/Getty Images

OpenAI cofounder Sutskever was chief scientist at the company before he announced his departure. He also played a key role in the November effort to remove Altman as CEO, according to reports.

"The company's trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous," Sutskever wrote in a May post on X. He added that he had confidence in Altman, Brockman, and Murati to create artificial general intelligence that "is both safe and beneficial."

Sutskever's LinkedIn page indicates that he left OpenAI in June. He's now a co-founder and chief scientist at Safe Superintelligence, Business Insider reported that month.

Peter Deng

Deng, who was vice president of product at OpenAI, left earlier this year after joining the company in 2023, The Information reported in August.

His LinkedIn page still lists him at the company. Deng did not respond to a request for comment.

John Schulman

Schulman left OpenAI in August for a job at Anthropic, he said on X at the time.

"This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work," he wrote on X.

Schulman was a cofounder and research scientist at OpenAI, according to his website. "It's the first and only company where I've ever worked, other than an internship," he said of OpenAI in his farewell post on X.

Mira Murati

Mira Murati spent six-and-a-half years at OpenAI before announcing her departure. Bloomberg/ Getty Images

Chief Technology Officer Murati said that she would leave OpenAI in a memo to the company's employees on Wednesday.

"I'm stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration," Murati wrote in the memo.

Murati also briefly served as CEO in November as OpenAI's board tried to oust Altman. The effort was unsuccessful, and Altman returned to his role days after being fired.

In March, the New York Times reported that Murati had expressed concerns with Altman's leadership to the board before the attempted shakeup. Murati's lawyer told BI at the time: "The claims that she approached the board in an effort to get Mr. Altman fired last year or supported the board's actions are flat wrong."

Bob McGrew

McGrew has been OpenAI's chief research officer since August and has worked at the company since 2017, according to his LinkedIn page.

"It is time for me to take a break," McGrew wrote in a Wednesday post on X. "There is no better capstone to my work here than shipping o1 to the world," he added, referring to OpenAI's latest model.

McGrew said he would stay at OpenAI for two more months as Mark Chen assumes leadership of the company's research team.

Barret Zoph

Zoph has been vice president of research, post-training since September 2022, according to his LinkedIn page.

"I got to join right before ChatGPT and helped build the post-training team from scratch with John Schulman and others," Zoph wrote in a post on X on Wednesday, adding that he decided to leave "based on how I want to evolve the next phase of my career."

While OpenAI announced the departures of McGrew, Murati, and Zoph on Wednesday, Altman wrote in a memo to employees that all three "made these decisions independently of each other and amicably."