17-Year Amazon Exec Jumps Ship for OpenAI

A top executive announced on Monday that he had departed Amazon after 17 years to join OpenAI.

Torben Severson, who served as chief of staff to Amazon’s retail CEO Doug Herrington, said in a post on LinkedIn that he left the mega-retailer in October. Severson will now serve as Vice President, Head of Global Business Development at Sam Altman’s AI company.

“Joining OpenAI at such a defining moment in technology is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” Severson wrote in his LinkedIn post. “I’m drawn to moments of transformation — and it’s rare to be part of something so squarely at the frontier of what’s possible.”

A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed Severson’s new role. Severson and a spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

News of the move was first reported by The Information.

OpenAI’s global business development team is responsible for building out the company’s outside partnerships and commercial strategy.

In early November, OpenAI and AWS announced a $38 billion partnership, which gives Altman’s company access to “hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs.”

Severson spent much of his time at Amazon in business development, working on partnerships with other companies, including warrant deals. Most recently, he became Herrington’s technical advisor, a highly coveted role that involves joining the CEO in nearly every meeting and call.

He is one of more than a dozen former Amazon employees to join OpenAI over the past year, according to data from LiveData Technologies, a workforce tracking database. Over the past year, OpenAI has hired more than 400 workers, the database shows.

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