When investors poured $6.6 billion into OpenAI last week, they seemed largely indifferent to the latest drama, which recently saw the company’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, along with research director Bob McCrew and Barret Zoph, vice president of research, abruptly resigned. .
And yet, those three departures were just the latest in an ongoing exodus of key technical talent. In recent years, OpenAI has lost several researchers who played crucial roles in developing algorithms, techniques, and infrastructure that helped it become the world leader in AI, as well as a household name. Several other former OpenAI employees who spoke to WIRED said the continued shift toward a more commercial approach remains a source of friction.
“People who like to do research are forced to create products,” says a former employee who works at a rival AI company but has friends at OpenAI. This person says some of their contacts at the company have reached out in recent weeks to ask about jobs. OpenAI itself has also apparently changed its hiring priorities, according to compiled data for WIRING by light emissiona company that tracks job postings to analyze job trends. In 2021, 23 percent of its job offers were for general research roles. In 2024, general research accounted for just 4.4 percent of job openings.
The brain drain could have lasting implications for the direction and future success of OpenAI. Experts and former employees say the company still has a deep pool of talent, but competition is intensifying, making it harder to maintain an advantage.
The latest big-name departure, revealed Thursday, is that of Tim Brooks, head of OpenAI’s Sora AI video generation project. streams published in X which would join one of OpenAI’s main rivals, Google DeepMind.
“It could start to change things,” a former OpenAI staffer, now working in academia, says of the losses. They asked to remain anonymous for fear of damaging collaborative relationships with the AI industry.
For now, this person says, many students still put OpenAI at the top of their list of potential employers. It’s considered to be several months ahead of the competition, and potential employees are often willing to endure the apparent drama and infighting to be a part of it. But applicants also tend to be drawn to working with a particular researcher or team, and their calculations could change as more big-name researchers leave for rival AI companies or their own startups.
A look at some of OpenAI’s most important research shows how much talent has left. Of the 31 people listed as authors of an initial version of OpenAI’s GPT large language model, less than half remain at OpenAI, according to employment details obtained from LinkedIn or other public social media profiles. Several members of the team responsible for the development of GPT left OpenAI in 2021 to form Anthropic, now a major rival. About a third of those listed in the acknowledgments of a technical blog post describing ChatGPT have since left.
