OpenAI remains one of the most closely watched companies in artificial intelligence, but its recent wave of departures has raised a harder question: can it keep its lead while some of the people behind its core breakthroughs move on?
Investors recently put $6.6 billion into OpenAI, even as the company was dealing with another round of executive and research exits. The money signals confidence. The departures, however, show how quickly the competitive landscape around AI talent is changing.
A leadership shake-up with technical weight
The most recent drama included the abrupt exits of chief technology officer Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McCrew, and Barret Zoph, a vice president of research. Their departures followed a longer pattern: over the past few years, OpenAI has lost researchers who helped build the algorithms, techniques, and infrastructure that turned it into a global AI leader.
Another major departure came when Tim Brooks, head of OpenAI’s Sora AI video generation project, posted on X that he would join Google DeepMind. That move matters because Google DeepMind is one of OpenAI’s main rivals, and advanced AI video generation is a high-profile frontier for the industry.
Former employees described the situation as more than ordinary churn. One former OpenAI staff member now in academia said of the losses,
“It could start to change things,”according to the source article. The same person said many students still see OpenAI as a top potential employer, partly because it is viewed as several months ahead of competitors.
But recruiting is not only about company reputation. Applicants often want to work with a specific researcher or team. As more prominent researchers leave for rival AI companies or their own startups, those choices may become less automatic.
Research culture is colliding with product pressure
Several former OpenAI employees told WIRED that a stronger commercial focus has become a source of friction inside the company. One former employee who works at a rival AI company but has friends at OpenAI put the tension bluntly:
“People who like to do research are being forced to do product,”
That claim lines up with hiring data compiled for WIRED by Lightcast, a company that tracks job postings to analyze labor trends. In 2021, 23 percent of OpenAI’s job postings were for general research roles. In 2024, general research accounted for just 4.4 percent of job postings.
The shift does not mean OpenAI has stopped doing research. It does suggest a different balance inside the company. A lab known for frontier research is also trying to support fast-growing products, revenue targets, investor expectations, and competition from other large technology companies.
That balance is difficult because the same people who drive scientific progress may not always want to spend their time turning research into commercial products. For an AI company, that tension can affect what gets built, which teams grow, and where ambitious researchers decide to work.
The people leaving helped shape modern OpenAI
The departures are notable because many of the names are tied to work that helped define OpenAI’s rise. Of 31 people listed as authors of an early version of OpenAI’s GPT large language model, fewer than half remain at the company, according to employment details sourced from LinkedIn or other public social media profiles. Roughly a third of those listed in the acknowledgements for a technical blog post describing ChatGPT have also left.
Several members of the team responsible for developing GPT left OpenAI in 2021 to form Anthropic, which is now a major rival. That example shows how talent departures can do more than weaken one company. They can seed direct competitors.
Ilya Sutskever is among the largest losses. A cofounder and technical visionary for much of OpenAI’s early work, Sutskever departed in May to found Safe Superintelligence. He did pioneering work on deep learning and was an early believer that scaling up compute used to build models would produce increasingly capable AI. He also recognized that the transformer, a neural network architecture developed by Google researchers, could be important for improving AI’s language abilities.
Other departures include Jan Leike, who co-led a team focused on managing long-term AI risks, and John Schulman, an OpenAI cofounder and respected research scientist who announced in August that he was leaving. Schulman worked on techniques for fine-tuning large language models with human feedback using reinforcement learning, an approach that helped make ChatGPT capable and conversational.
Andrej Kaparthy, a cofounder who rejoined OpenAI in 2022 after working as director of AI at Tesla, left in February of 2024 to found Eureka Labs, an education AI startup.
Rivals have a clearer opening
The talent movement comes as competition is intensifying. Google and others are putting large resources behind competing AI offerings. Meta offers free AI models and tools that are often as good as those provided by for-profit players. Anthropic, formed in part by former OpenAI researchers, is already a major rival.
OpenAI is also under pressure to justify its rising valuation. According to a report in The New York Times that cited a document shared with prospective investors, OpenAI aims to increase revenue to $100 billion per year by 2029. The company expects ChatGPT to bring in $2.7 billion in revenue this year, up from $700 million in 2023, with another $1 billion coming from other sources.
Those targets help explain why product focus has grown. They also sharpen the stakes of losing senior researchers. OpenAI’s future depends not only on selling existing tools, but on continuing to reach key advances before competitors do.
Still, former employees do not describe the company as emptying out. One early OpenAI employee said the departures are significant because of the importance of the work those people produced, but also noted that OpenAI still has extremely talented young researchers and can offer large sums of money to recruits because of its soaring valuation.
OpenAI still has depth, but the story is no longer simple
OpenAI’s internal picture appears mixed. One former staffer said product focus continued to cause tension and that current staff had warned them to expect more turmoil. Another person described the mood more unevenly:
“The mood is bleak for some and not for others,”
The company pointed WIRED to a message Sam Altman sent after the departures of Murati, McGrew, and Zoph, which he also shared on X. In that note, Altman named researchers moving into more senior roles, including Mark Chen, who will become a senior vice president of research, and Jakub Pachocki, who becomes chief scientist.
Altman wrote,
“Leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially companies that grow so quickly and are so demanding,”and added,
“I obviously won’t pretend it’s natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal co
The broader question is whether OpenAI can keep converting research depth into industry-leading systems while its commercial ambitions expand and rivals recruit from the same elite pool. The company still has money, visibility, and technical talent. But the talent exodus gives competitors something valuable: people who know how OpenAI became OpenAI.