When investors poured $6.6 billion into OpenAI last week, they seemed largely unbothered by the latest drama, which recently saw the company's Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, along with Chief Research Officer Bob McCrew and Barret Zoph, a vice president of research, resigned abruptly. .
And yet these three departures were just the latest in an ongoing exodus of key engineering talent. In recent years, OpenAI has lost several researchers who played a crucial role in developing the algorithms, techniques and infrastructure that made it the world leader in AI, as well as a household name. Several other ex-OpenAI employees who spoke to WIRED said an ongoing shift toward a more commercial focus remains a source of friction.
“People who like to do research are forced to make products,” says a former employee who works at a rival AI company but has friends at OpenAI. This person says some of his contacts at the company have reached out in recent weeks to inquire about job openings. OpenAI itself has also seemingly changed in its hiring priorities, according to data collected for WIRED by Lightcast, a company that tracks job postings to analyze employment trends. In 2021, 23 percent of vacancies were for general research positions. In 2024, general research accounted for only 4.4 percent of vacancies.
The brain drain could have lasting consequences for the direction and future success of OpenAI. Experts and former employees say the company still has plenty of talent, but competition is becoming increasingly fierce, making it harder to maintain an edge.
The latest big-name departure, revealed Thursday, is that of Tim Brooks, head of OpenAI's Sora AI video generation project. Brooks posted on X that he would be joining one of OpenAI's main rivals, Google DeepMind.
“It could change things,” a former OpenAI employee who now works in academia said of the losses. They asked to remain anonymous out of concern about damaging collaborative relationships with the AI industry.
For now, this person says, many students still place OpenAI at the top of their list of potential employers. It's seen as a several months' head start on the competition, and potential employees are often willing to put up with the apparent drama and infighting to be part of it. But applicants also often gravitate toward working with a particular researcher or team, and their calculations may change as more big-name researchers leave for rival AI companies or their own startups.
A look at some of OpenAI's key research shows just how much talent has left. Of the 31 people listed as authors of an early version of OpenAI's GPT major language model, fewer than half remain at OpenAI, according to employment data sourced from LinkedIn or other public social media profiles. Several members of the team responsible for developing GPT left OpenAI in 2021 to form Anthropic, now a major rival. About a third of those listed in the acknowledgments for a technical blog post describing ChatGPT have since left.
