The People Who Make OpenAI Run Fast

Sam Altman has been the face of OpenAI as it quickly outmaneuvered rivals such as Google to launch cutting-edge artificial intelligence to the public. But the co-founder and CEO delegates broad authority to a handful of lieutenants who have managed its growing workforce, developed new software and integrated it with products made by Microsoft. They have also made it dead simple for thousands of other companies to use the software with their own apps.

“I could decide that I’m just going to go retire and live on a beach tomorrow, and that would be fine,” Altman told The Information in an interview. “[If] you have some of these key technical people decide they’re going to do that, we’ll be in very bad shape.”

The Information’s org chart above highlights 24 key decision-makers at OpenAI, many of whom previously held senior roles at other startups—experience that appears to have contributed to the company’s speed. Current and former employees attribute much of OpenAI’s success to its flat organizational structure, with relatively few managers overseeing technical teams, and its leaders’ ability to overcome a common problem at tech companies: getting in-house AI researchers to work well with software engineers to turn their research into commercial products.