John Schulman's resignation and Greg Brockman's sabbatical from OpenAI might be innocuous. But given other recent high-profile departures, it could signal internal unrest within the company.
A changing of the guard is underway as more OpenAI leaders leave the company.
On Monday, co-founder and ChatGPT lead John Schulman announced that he was leaving OpenAI for rival AI company Anthropic.
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Hours later, co-founder and president Greg Brockman shared that he was taking a sabbatical until the end of the year. According to The Information, VP of product Peter Deng has also left OpenAI.
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The alleged staffing triple-whammy comes not long after other high-profile departures from OpenAI due to reported disagreements over the company's mission and approach to safety. OpenAI's chief scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned in May, and days later, safety leader Jan Leike who worked under Sutskever quit, after publicly criticizing OpenAI on X, saying "safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products."
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Publicly, Sutskever said his decision to leave OpenAI is to focus "on a project that is very personally meaningful." But the internet immediately began speculating about whether his departure was triggered by the attempted ouster of CEO Sam Altman, which was allegedly led by Sutskever who reportedly disagreed with Altman's prioritization of profit over safety.
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Schulman has taken a similar public stance by explaining his decision to leave OpenAI as a matter of personal growth. "I've decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I'm most interested in," said Schulman. "To be clear, I'm not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI... my decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career."
Brockman's only explanation for his decision to take leave was, "first time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago."
Of course this could all be as straightforward as OpenAI leadership moving on and taking time off after many years of achievements and hard work now that the company has entered a new chapter of its existence. However, the timing of the departures can't be ignored. First, there's Altman's behavior: the former OpenAI board fired Altman for "outright lying," and then there was the whole Scarlett Johansson debacle.
Plus, ChatGPT has massive operating costs. Rival companies are catching up, with some of those companies like Meta offering free open-source models, and there's no news of GPT-5. Combine those issues with a really bad day for tech stocks on Wall Street and Goldman Sachs' bearish take on generative AI, and it starts to look like those who left OpenAI saw the writing on the wall — and the writing said the AI bubble has burst.
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That said, there's still lots to expect from the OpenAI pipeline. The company's search engine prototype SearchGPT is coming soon, and its AI video generator Sora awaits its public debut. So, a splashy launch could reignite interest and market demand, even without OpenAI's old guard. We'll just have to wait and see.
Mashable has reached out to OpenAI about the significance of its staffing changes, and will update if we hear back.
