OpenAI is bleeding talent in the wake of Sam Altman's ouster

• Greg Brockman announced three key OpenAI staffers are following him and Sam Altman to Microsoft.
• Their departures fuel fears of an employee exodus at the embattled AI startup.

The tech world is reeling from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's announcement that Sam Altman will join the tech giant as the head of its new advanced AI research team.

Now, it seems like others may be following Altman to Microsoft.

Former OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who quit after Altman's ousting and is joining the former OpenAI CEO at Microsoft, posted on X that the "initial leadership" of the new AI team will include OpenAI staffers Jakub Pachocki, Szymon Sidor, and Aleksander Madry — implying that they are all set to leave the AI startup.

All three are senior or longstanding employees at OpenAI, suggesting that the company may face a talent drain after Altman's shock firing. OpenAI announced that Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear would become interim CEO of the AI firm, after negotiations to bring Altman back broke down.

Pachocki was OpenAI's director of research, Madry the company's head of preparedness, and Sidor a research scientist who has been at OpenAI since 2016, a year after it was founded.

It comes as fears grow that the chaotic turn of events may spark an employee exodus at OpenAI, which has rapidly become a global leader in AI following the record-breaking launch of ChatGPT last year.

There were signs of growing dissatisfaction within the company on Monday morning, with former and current employees including CTO Mira Murati and COO Brad Lightcap posting the seemingly coordinated statement: "OpenAI is nothing without its people" on X.

The Information reported on Sunday that dozens of employees announced internally that they were quitting the company after chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said that Altman would not be returning. OpenAI technical staff member Tao Xu also announced he would be quitting in a post on X.

OpenAI's rivals are mobilizing rapidly to try and take advantage of the situation and lure disaffected staffers away from the embattled AI startup.

The Information also reported that fellow AI startups Cohere and Adept were reaching out to OpenAI employees and that Google Deepmind had received an uptick in resumes from OpenAI workers.

Others have reached out over social media as the online firestorm over Altman's shock firing has played out. Nvidia's senior AI scientist Jim Fan said he was "shocked" by the developments and posted a direct appeal to OpenAI workers on X, saying that the company "has warm GPUs for you on a cold winter night like this, fresh out of the oven."

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.