OpenAI’s leadership is in upheaval, but overall turnover looks shockingly low
We cross-checked the open letter most OpenAI employees signed against their publicly available employment data to see who stayed, who left, and where they work now.
OpenAI, the startup that has become synonymous with artificial intelligence itself, has seen a string of high-profile exits recently.
Mira Murati, previously OpenAI’s chief technology officer, announced her departure last Wednesday. A few hours later, Bob McGrew, OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, a vice president who ran a research team, both announced their resignations, too. They follow the departure of co-founders Ilya Sutskever and Andrej Karpathy, researcher Jan Leike and half of the entire AI safety research team, as well as an “extended leave of absence” for co-founder and president Greg Brockman. Only three of the 11 cofounders — Sam Altman, Wojciech Zaremba and technically Brockman — are still at the company.
Even though that seems like a serious shakeup since the board fired, and then brought back, Altman, the vast majority of OpenAI employees have stayed, according to a data analysis. During the Altman ouster saga last year, employees of OpenAI en masse signed an open letter in support of Altman — which gives us a snapshot of nearly every employee at the company at that time. We took all 702 names on the latest published version of the list we could find and asked Live Data Technologies to analyze how many OpenAI employees who signed the open letter have changed employers based on publicly available employment data sources, including LinkedIn, since November.
The number is surprisingly low: despite the high-profile exits, only 41 out of the 702 people — or about 6% — who signed the open letter to the board have left the company as of September 2024, according to the Live Data analysis. Of course, publicly available data is imperfect — employees may not have up-to-date info on their social pages or may not have announced their departure, or there might not be publicly available data on certain employees at all. Still, when the data spans hundreds of employees, you can paint a pretty decent picture.
A lot has changed at OpenAI since the Altman saga. Many of the company’s most important workers have left. And the roughly 770-employee non-profit has expanded drastically, becoming a 1,700-employee for-profit company. But its base of workers who were there when the Altman drama played out seems to have remained.
Here are some notable moves at OpenAI since November, according to various press reports and employee posts. Many of the researchers and executives below did not sign the open letter.
Andrej Karpathy, co-founder and research scientist at OpenAI, left in February.
William Sauders, a member of the Superalignment team, which focuses on AI safety, left in February.
Cullen O’Keefe, a policy researcher, left in April.
Daniel Kokotajlo, a researcher on OpenAI’s governance division, left in April. He said that he quit OpenAI because “due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI”.
Kokotajlo told Fortune that nearly half of the 30 or so OpenAI staff who worked on long-term AI safety has left the company, including Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Collin Burns, Jeffrey Wu, Jonathan Uesato, Steven Bills, Yuri Burda, Todor Markov and cofounder John Schulman. (Schulman and Bills both joined rival Anthropic, and both signed the open letter in November.)
Jan Leike, head of alignment, resigned in May and joined Anthropic.
Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist, left OpenAI to work on his own company Safe Superintelligence, in May. He was one of the board members who voted to fire Altman.
Brockman said that he would take an extended leave of absence until the end of the year.
