OpenAI lost 3 senior executives in a row, and Ultraman, the lone commander, urgently supports Chinese people to take over! 15 generals were lost in half a year

Mingmin from Aofei Temple
Quantum Bit | Public Account QbitAI

Another round of shock has come to OpenAI, with three senior executives leaving within one day.

Shortly after CTO Mira officially announced his resignation, Altman personally announced more senior personnel changes.

Head of research Bob McGrew and vice president of research Barret Zoph will also leave OpenAI.

Mira, Bob, and Barret made these decisions independently and amicably.

But the timing of Mira's decision makes it more logical for us to announce these changes together now so that we can work together to smoothly transition to the next generation of leadership.

After issuing the notice within OpenAI, Altman immediately synchronized the latest situation to everyone.

Netizens lamented that it has been less than a year since Altman’s “Return of Empress Xi” drama last year, and some of his former supporters have left.

According to incomplete statistics from QuantumBit, OpenAI has lost more than ten senior executives and core technical personnel in 2024.

At the same time, OpenAI is also ushering in a new generation of leadership.

The most noteworthy of these is the promotion of Mark Chen to become the new Senior Vice President of Research (SVP of Research), leading research work together with Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki .

Altman said he didn't want to pretend to be calm about the current changes, because Mira had only informed him of her decision to resign that morning.

Why did they bring it up so suddenly? The reason was given: if it wasn’t so sudden, the news would definitely be leaked, so it’s better to bring it up suddenly.

Altman accepted this reason and said that they had a gathering at 5:30 pm. Tomorrow OpenAI will hold a general meeting and answer all questions.

Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon also tweeted: I can’t find a better partner than Mira.

But on the other hand, there are reports that OpenAI is discussing giving Altman a 7% stake in the company and restructuring it into a for-profit enterprise, which means Altman will gain ownership of OpenAI for the first time .

△ "Chaos is a ladder", from "Game of Thrones"

OpenAI’s “Third Split”

The two latest executives to leave responded to the news on Twitter. Both said it was time to leave, but neither mentioned where they would go next.

Bob McGrew joined OpenAI in January 2017 and was promoted from technical staff to vice president of research in 2018, and later served as director of research.

He is responsible for leading OpenAI's research efforts, building "the most powerful models in the world and then making them available to the world through ChatGPT and the API."

Not long ago, he and the o1 team were interviewed and revealed the development details behind it.

Regarding his resignation, he said:

My eight years at OpenAI have been both humbling and awe-inspiring. The small nonprofit I joined in January 2017 has become the most important research and development company in the world.

I have thoroughly enjoyed working with a group of smart, dedicated colleagues - there is no other place in the world like it. I am incredibly proud of the work our research team has done over the years, from early achievements in reinforcement learning, to pioneering large-scale language models, to building the first multimodal generative model, and finally changing the world with ChatGPT.

Now it’s time for me to take a break. Nothing could be a better summary of my work here than launching o1, a project at OpenAI.

Moving forward, Mark Chen will lead the research team as Senior Vice President, and Jakub will continue to serve as Chief Scientist. Over the next two months, I will continue to support Mark, Jakub, and the team as they make the transition. I have every confidence in their leadership and ability to advance OpenAI's research into AGI and beyond. I can't wait to see what the team does next.

Another executive who left is Barret Zoph.

He joined OpenAI in 2022, building and leading the post-training team from scratch.

When OpenAI released Her, he was the one who went on stage to demonstrate a video call. He was the one that AI mistook for a wooden table because of the delay.

Now that Her is fully open to paying users, it is time for him to leave.

Regarding his resignation, Zoph said it was a decision based on his personal career development needs.

Hello everyone, I have decided to leave OpenAI.

This decision was extremely difficult because I had an incredible time at OpenAI. I joined before ChatGPT was released and built the post-training team from scratch with John Schulman and others. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to lead the post-training team and help build and scale ChatGPT to the scale it is today. Now it seems like the right time for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI. This is a decision based on my personal career development needs.

I am very grateful for all the opportunities OpenAI has given me, and for the support of leadership like Sam and Greg. A special thank you to Bob for everything he has done for me, and he has been a great manager and colleague throughout my career at OpenAI. The post-training team has many great leaders, and I am sure they will continue to lead the team well.

OpenAI is and will continue to do incredible work, and I am optimistic about the company's future and will continue to cheer you all on.

With Barret's departure, OpenAI employees lamented that this was the third split of OpenAI , and the post-training team also fell apart.

The first split of OpenAI here refers to the Amodei brothers and sisters leading a large number of GPT-3 research members to leave and establish Anthropic, and later released the Claude model, becoming one of OpenAI's biggest competitors.

Last month, John Schulman, who had established a post-training team with Barrett, left for Anthropic.

A new pattern has taken shape

With the departure of several senior executives, a new pattern has taken shape.

Mark Chen will next serve as Senior Vice President of Research.

He has been with OpenAI since 2018, and his previous position was vice president of research, in charge of cutting-edge research, and a coach at the US IOI.

He was core involved in the development of models such as DALL・E, GPT-4, and o1.

He was previously featured in 4o's launch demo.

Next, he will co-lead OpenAI's research work with Jakub Pachocki .

Jakub Pachocki joined OpenAI in 2017. He initially led the Dota team and later took charge of the reasoning and deep learning teams. He is one of the core contributors to models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. He was responsible for the GPT-4 project as a whole and was also the head of the optimization team.

In May this year, he succeeded Ilya and was promoted to chief scientist.

Joshua Achiam will become the new head of the alignment team, which will ensure that OpenAI's research is always safe and correct to achieve its ultimate mission.

He came to OpenAI as an intern in 2017 and later became a research scientist. He has been committed to research in the field of AI security.

In May of this year, with the departure of Ilya and Jan Leike, one of the inventors of RLHF, the OpenAI Super Alignment team fell apart.

Kevin Weil and Srinivas Narayanan will continue to lead the applications team.

Kevin Weil joined OpenAI in June this year as CPO (Chief Product Officer).

Srinivas joined in 2023 as Vice President of Engineering, leading OpenAI engineering work, including ChatGPT, developer platform, and related infrastructure support.

Matthew Knight will serve as Chief Information Security Officer.

He joined OpenAI in 2020 to lead research and engineering work in safety, IT, and security and privacy.

Finally, here is Altman’s original text:

ChatGPT translation is as follows.

I just posted this announcement at OpenAI:

Hello everyone,

Mira has been instrumental in the development and growth of OpenAI over the past 6.5 years. She has been a key factor in our evolution from a humble research lab to a major company.

I was saddened this morning when Mira told me she was leaving, but of course I support her decision. Over the past year she has been developing a group of outstanding leaders who will continue to drive our progress.

I also wanted to share that Bob and Barret have also decided to leave OpenAI. Mira, Bob, and Barret made these decisions independently and amicably. But due to the timing of Mira’s decision, it makes more sense for us to announce these changes together now so that we can work together to smoothly transition to the next generation of leadership.

I am extremely grateful for their contributions.

Being a leader at OpenAI is all-consuming. On the one hand, it is a privilege to build AGI and bring our advanced research to hundreds of millions of people, but on the other hand, it is extremely hard to lead the team to accomplish these tasks - they work incredibly hard for the company.

Mark will become our new Senior Vice President of Research and will lead the Research organization alongside Chief Scientist Jakub. This has been our long-planned succession plan for Bob, and while this move is coming sooner than we expected, I am very excited about Mark taking on this role. Mark clearly has deep technical expertise, and he has also learned over the past few years how to be an excellent leader and manager.

Josh Achiam will serve as the new Head of Mission Alignment, working across the company to ensure we are getting everything right, including culture, to achieve our mission. Kevin and Srinivas will continue to lead the Apps team.

Matt Knight will serve as our Chief Information Security Officer, a position he has held for a long time. This has always been our plan.

Mark, Jakub, Kevin, Srinivas, Matt, and Josh will report to me. I have spent the past year or so focusing primarily on the non-technical parts of our organization; now I look forward to devoting the majority of my time to the technical and product parts of the company.

We will be gathering tonight at 5:30pm in 575 with Mira, Bob, Barret, and Mark. This is to show our gratitude and reflect on what we have accomplished together. Tomorrow we will have a general meeting where we can answer any questions. The schedule invitation will be sent out soon.

Leadership changes are a natural part of a company's evolution, especially one that is growing quickly and demanding. I won't pretend that it's normal for this change to be so sudden, but we are not a normal company, and I think the reasons Mira explained to me (that there is never a right time, any decision that is not sudden will leak, and she wants to act when OpenAI is on the rise) are reasonable. We can discuss this further at tomorrow's all-hands meeting.

Thank you all for your hard work and dedication.

Sam

Reference links:
[1] https://x.com/sama/status/1839096160168063488
[2] https://x.com/bobmcgrewai/status/1839099787423134051?s=46&t=iTysI4vQLQqCNJjSmBODPw
[3] https://x.com/barret_zoph/status/1839095143397515452?s=46&t=iTysI4vQLQqCNJjSmBODPw

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