OpenAI Exits, Appointments and New Corporate Model

Wednesday brought more turmoil in the top ranks of OpenAI after three executives in leadership positions quit the company at a time when the artificial intelligence giant seeks to convert itself into a for-profit entity.

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CEO Sam Altman announced the exits of Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Research Vice President Barret Zoph on Wednesday, on the heels of CTO Mira Murati’s resignation.

“Mira, Bob and Barret made these decisions independently of each other and amicably,” Altman said, adding it “made sense” to rejig the team all at once now for a “smooth handover to the next generation of leadership.”

McGrew joined OpenAI as a technical staff member in 2017, became the vice president of research the next year and later became chief research officer. In a social media post, he said that it was “time for me to take a break,” adding that there was “no better capstone” to his work than releasing OpenAI’s latest model, codenamed Strawberry.

Since 2022, Zoph has led the team that trains AI models before they’re deployed into OpenAI’s customer-facing products. He said on X that the departure was “like a natural point” to “explore new opportunities.” “This is a personal decision based on how I want to evolve the next phase of my career,” he said.

Murati’s announcement of her “difficult decision” to leave her role of six and a half years came hours before McGrew and Zoph’s. “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right,” she said. In response to her tweet, Altman thanked Murati, adding that he was “excited for what she’ll do next.”

Altman said that leadership changes are a natural part of companies, especially ones that “grow so quickly and are so demanding.” “I obviously won’t pretend it’s natural for this one to be so abrupt, but we are not a normal company, and I think the reasons Mira explained to me (there is never a good time, anything not abrupt would have leaked, and she wanted to do this while OpenAI was in an upswing) make sense.”

The departures come against the backdrop of OpenAI reportedly pivoting from being a nonprofit to a profit-making company, with Altman poised to receive a 7% equity stake. The nonprofit will reportedly continue to exist and own a minority stake in the for-profit company. The new structure may also affect how the company prioritizes and addresses AI risks.

The AI giant reportedly raised $6.5 billion at a valuation of $150 billion, likely the largest venture capital fundraising round of all time.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit but controls a rapidly growing commercial business. Critics have said that OpenAI prioritizes profit over safety. The company reportedly expedited the release of an AI model powering ChatGPT to meet a deadline despite employee concerns about insufficient security testing, mere months after pledging to the White House to rigorously safety-test new versions to ensure its technology could not be misused. The company even set up a committee to make “critical” safety and security decisions for all of its projects in May, after disbanding its “superalignment” security team dedicated to preventing AI systems from going rogue (see: OpenAI Formulates Framework to Mitigate ‘Catastrophic Risks’).

Altman also announced new appointments in his X post.

Vice President of Research Mark Chen will take over the role of senior vice president of research and head the research arm with Jakub Pachocki as the chief scientist. Former head of security Matt Knight is now the CISO and research scientist Josh Achiam will be the head of mission alignment to “ensure that we get all pieces and culture right to be in a place to succeed at the mission.”

Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil and Vice President of Engineering Srinivas Narayanan will remain heads of the applied team that distributes the company’s tech to enterprise and consumer customers.

All of them will report directly to Altman.

“I have over the past year or so spent most of my time on the nontechnical parts of our organization; I am now looking forward to spending most of my time on the technical and product parts of the company,” he said.

The departures of McGrew, Zoph and Murati follow those of the superalignment safety team’s leaders – OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike – who quit the company over their disagreement on the approach to security, as did policy researcher Gretchen Krueger.

Both Sutskever and Leike worked on addressing the long-term safety risks facing the company and the technology, and Leike in a social media post criticized OpenAI’s lack of support for the superalignment security team. “Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products,” Leike said. Sutskever and Murati – who was briefly the company’s interim CEO – were reportedly among the board members who in November removed Sam Altman from OpenAI only to see him reinstated as CEO five days later. Krueger said she decided to resign a few hours before her other two colleagues did, as she shared their security concerns.

Research scientist Andrej Karpathy also quit the company in February, saying “nothing happened,” while co-founder John Schulman left the company last month to join rival Anthropic. OpenAI President Greg Brockman said he was taking a sabbatical till the end of the year.

Of the 13 founding team members during OpenAI’s launch in 2015, only three remain at the company.