OpenAI had a year of high-profile departures.
Over the summer, the ChatGPT creator lost at least seven researchers and scientists to Meta’s billion-dollar effort to beef up its AI team at its Superintelligence Lab.
This came after the company saw an exodus of top executives in 2024 amid a restructuring effort, including chief technology officer Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew, and vice president of research Barret Zoph.
CEO Sam Altman is now one of only two active remaining members of the company’s original 11-person founding team.
Here’s a running list of researchers and executives OpenAI has lost this year and where they’ve ended up.
Researchers lost to Meta
Jason Wei
Wei, a research scientist who worked on OpenAI’s o1 and deep research models, left in July for Meta’s Superintelligence Lab.
Zhiqing Sun
Sun, who left for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs in July, was a research scientist at OpenAI.
Hyung Won Chung
Chung is part of the trio of OpenAI research scientists who departed for Meta’s Superintelligence Lab in July. He posted on LinkedIn alongside his two colleagues that they are having “so much fun building from a clean slate with a truly talent-dense team.”
Shengjia Zhao
Zhao became the chief scientist of the Meta Superintelligence Lab in July after co-creating ChatGPT and GPT-4 at OpenAI. The prominent researcher is working directly with Mark Zuckerberg and Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang .
Jiahui Yu
Yu is widely credited with leading the Perception team in OpenAI to develop the “senses” of a Large Language Model, including images, audio, and sensor readings. He departed for Meta’s Superintelligence Lab in late June.
Hongyu Ren
Ren was poached by Meta’s Superintelligence Lab over the summer. He was a core contributor to OpenAI’s GPT-4o model.
Shuchao Bi
Bi was an OpenAI researcher on multimodal and reinforcement learning. He left in June for Meta’s Superintelligence Lab to work on reinforcement learning, post-training, and AI agents.
Other exits
Larry Summers
Summers, who is also a former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president, resigned from the OpenAI board in November. The resignation came shortly after a House panel released years of email exchanges between Summers and Jeffrey Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking minors.
Julia Villagra
In August, Villagra resigned as chief people officer after being promoted to the role in March.
Liam Fedus
Fedus was the vice president of research and post-training at OpenAI until he left the company in March. In September, he co-founded an AI startup called Periodic Labs, which aims to create an AI scientist.
Tom Cunningham
Cunningham was OpenAI’s data scientist and economic researcher until he resigned in November. He joined Model Evaluation and Threat Research, a non-profit research institute that evaluates AI models’ capabilities and safety level.
Hannah Wong
Weeks before the end of the year, Wong, OpenAI’s chief communications officer, announced her departure for her “next chapter,” according to a post on her LinkedIn. She added that Lindsey Held Bolton will lead the communications team as the interim, while the company searches for a new CCO. It is unclear what Wong’s next job will be.
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