Just two of OpenAI’s 11-strong founding team are still active at the ChatGPT maker, after an exodus following November’s attempted boardroom coup against chief executive Sam Altman.
Three co-founders have departed so far this year, including John Schulman, who defected to its artificial intelligence rival Anthropic this week. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, also said on Monday he would be taking extended leave from the company.
A high rate of turnover is not unusual at a start-up. However, attrition of senior figures at OpenAI has stepped up in recent months following November’s leadership crisis, when Altman was fired by his board only to be reinstated days later.
Since then, the loss of executives and staffers working on AI safety and research has raised questions about the direction of the $86bn company, which is in a fierce battle to stay ahead of rivals including Google and Anthropic.
Some co-founders have absconded to rivals, others to launch their own AI companies, while the team’s most famous former member — Elon Musk — has become a vociferous critic of OpenAI in public and in the courts.
OpenAI had a larger number of founders than most Silicon Valley start-ups because Altman and Brockman wanted to build an AI supergroup of the top researchers in the field when it got started in 2015. Here is where those 11 founders are now.
Leavers
Greg Brockman
on a leave of absence since August 2024
Brockman is a core member of OpenAI’s founding team. He was persuaded by Altman and Musk to leave his job as chief technology officer at financial technology company Stripe and take on the same position at OpenAI.
He has been a key Altman ally since the beginning. When the board moved against Altman in a coup in November, Brockman was also removed as a director. The two returned to their posts together when the board backtracked five days later.
On Monday, the company’s president announced he would be taking a sabbatical for the rest of the year.
“First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago,” he wrote on X. “I’ve poured my life for the past 9 years into OpenAI, including the entirety of my marriage. Our work is important to me, but so is life.”
John Schulman
joined Anthropic in August 2024
Schulman, a research scientist who played a vital role in building the company’s ChatGPT chatbot, announced he would leave OpenAI on Monday. He was responsible for fine-tuning the company’s AI models and ensuring they behaved in a way that conformed to human values — a process known as alignment.
He will take up a similar role at rival start-up Anthropic, which itself was founded by ex-OpenAI researchers in 2021.
“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, alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in,” Schulman said in a note to colleagues on Monday.
Ilya Sutskever
left to found Safe Superintelligence in May 2024
Sutskever left his position as OpenAI’s chief scientist six months after voting with the company’s board to remove Altman. Sutskever, one of the most prominent researchers in the field, reversed his position and backed the chief executive’s return a few days later.
Nonetheless, he has been largely absent from public view in the months since the abortive coup, and in May he left to start a company called Safe Superintelligence.
Andrej Karpathy
left to found Eureka Labs in February 2024
Karpathy, a research scientist who was advised at Stanford by “Godmother of AI” Fei-Fei Li, first left OpenAI in 2017 to join Tesla as a senior director. He returned to OpenAI in 2023 and left again a year later to launch Eureka Labs, which is building AI teaching assistants.
Durk Kingma
left for Google Brain in June 2018
Kingma, who worked on developing algorithms for generative AI models, left for Google in the summer of 2018. He has continued to lead research on large language models and image models at Google Brain, which merged with DeepMind last year.
Elon Musk
resigned from the board in 2018
Musk, who provided much of OpenAI’s early funding, left the company in 2018 after clashing with Altman over the direction of research. The billionaire launched a rival company, xAI, last year and claims he can overhaul OpenAI’s lead.
The Tesla, SpaceX and X chief has also launched a number of lawsuits against Altman and OpenAI, arguing this week that he was induced to invest in the AI company by its “fake humanitarian mission”.
Pamela Vagata
JOINED STRIPE in 2016
Vagata, listed as a founding member of OpenAI in the company’s launch announcement, makes no mention of the start-up in her LinkedIn profile. She joined Stripe as a technical leader in the fintech company’s AI team in 2016, and founded early-stage venture capital firm Pebblebed in 2021.
Vicki Cheung
JOINED LYFT in 2017
Cheung, who worked on language-learning app Duolingo before becoming OpenAI’s first engineer, left the company in 2017 to join ride-hailing start-up Lyft. In 2020 she founded machine learning start-up Gantry alongside former OpenAI researcher Josh Tobin.
Trevor Blackwell
left in 2017
Blackwell was a partner at Y Combinator, the San Francisco start-up accelerator that Altman ran before establishing OpenAI. He helped launch the AI company and left in 2017. A robotics enthusiast, he is now based in Gloucestershire, England.
Remainers
Sam Altman
Altman remains as OpenAI’s chief executive after surviving a boardroom coup in November, during which directors accused him of not being “consistently candid” with them. He was reinstated five days after being fired on the back of a campaign by employees and investors in OpenAI, including Microsoft.
The departure of other senior figures has left the 39-year-old as by far the most prominent figure at the company, and the reconstitution of the board after its failed ousting has further solidified his power.
Wojciech Zaremba
Polish computer scientist Zaremba remains at OpenAI where he works as a researcher. He called on the board to resign after they moved against Altman, and has since urged his chief executive and Musk to drop their “unnecessary fight”.
“It would be so much better to put your creative energy into building the future you dream of over a quarrel. May you (both) be happy and find peace,” he wrote in a post on X in March, signing off with a love heart.
Additional reporting by Madhumita Murgia