Three key OpenAI executives have left their positions in a recent leadership shakeup at CEO Sam Altman’s company.
Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI and one of its 11 co-founders, has announced that he will be taking a sabbatical from the company until the end of the year.
“I’m taking the rest of the year off and can relax for the first time since I co-founded OpenAI 9 years ago,” Brockman wrote to X. “The mission is far from complete; we still have work to do to build safe AGI.”
Another co-founder, John Schulman, left OpenAI to join rival Anthropic, where he led the OpenAI team responsible for “post-training,” the effort to hone the large-scale language models that power ChatGPT.
A third product executive, Peter Deng, has also reportedly left the company. To informationnoted that the exits appear to be unrelated.
The Post has reached out to OpenAI for comment.
“I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” Schulman acknowledged in a lengthy statement from X. He stressed that the move was unrelated to disagreements over OpenAI’s “alignment” work, an industry term for efforts to ensure that advanced AI works safely for the benefit of humanity.
“To be clear, I’m not leaving because of a lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI,” Schulman said. “On the contrary, the company’s leadership has been very committed to investing in the space.”
Altman responded with a message thanking Shulman for his work at OpenAI.
“You’re a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about products and society, and most importantly, you’re a great friend to all of us,” Shulman said. “We’re going to miss you terribly, and we know you’ll be proud of this place.”
OpenAI has been plagued by internal turmoil since Altman was briefly removed from the company’s previous board of directors last fall, but later returned as part of a deal that included a major overhaul of the nonprofit’s governance structure.
Brockman was ousted from OpenAI’s board of directors at the same time Altman was fired in November and resigned as president, but was reinstated as part of a restructuring.
More recently, Altman and his executive team have faced criticism from former employees who say they pursued fast product releases at the expense of safety.
In May, OpenAI disbanded its so-called “super-alignment” team, which was tasked with preventing outcomes that “could lead to the incapacity or even extinction of humanity.”
The team was dissolved shortly after two key leaders, Ilya Sutskever and Jan Reicke, announced their resignations from the company, which is led by Sam Altman.
OpenAI subsequently announced the creation of a new oversight board to handle safety-related issues at the company.
