A Flurry of Leadership Departures at OpenAI; Meta Flexes Its Advantage

You know what they say: when it rains, it pours. OpenAI employees experienced that firsthand yesterday, when they received abrupt news of three major leadership departures.

Chief technology officer Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew and head of post-training Barret Zoph are all leaving the ChatGPT maker, leaders told staff yesterday. Add onto that the departures (temporary and permanent) of other critical technical leaders in the last five months, such as former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and cofounders John Schulman and Greg Brockman, and OpenAI’s technical bench looks quite different than it did a year ago.

The timing of the departures left something to be desired, to say the least. They came as OpenAI looks to raise between $5 billion and $7 billion in new capital at a whopping $150 billion price. (We’d be curious whether prospective investors were aware of these upcoming exits when they were making the investment decisions.) And even though OpenAI recently released its reasoning-focused o1-preview model, if the past year of model releases has taught us anything, it’s that rivals are often close behind.