Two top executives at OpenAI have left the burgeoning company, with another taking extended leave, the Information reported on Monday.
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced in an X post he had departed the artificial intelligence (AI) firm to work with rival Anthropic.
He added he “made the difficult decision” to leave due to his “desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment” and “return to hands-on technical work.”
Despite his departure from OpenAI, he added,
“To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area. My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.”
The comments come as Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder, OpenAI posted he would go on extended leave. Peter Deng, Product Manager, OpenAI also left the company after starting work with the ChatGPT creator last year, the Information said in its report.
Reuters notes the San Francisco-based firm has faced major reshuffles in it leadership in the recent past, with Aleksander Madry, former AI Safety Head, being reassigned to a new role in the its operations.
Ilya Sutskever, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist and Andrej Karpathy, Founding Member, both resigned, with the latter launching an AI-based platform last month.
Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit
The news comes after one of the biggest names in tech, Elon Musk, relaunched his lawsuit against the AI enterprise on the same day.
The document alleges that the Telsa and SpaceX Chief Executive and Founder’s case against OpenAI was “a textbook tale of altruism versus greed.” Adding, it claimed that Sam Altman, Chief Executive, OpenAI,
“in concert with other Defendants, intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence […] Altman and his long-time association assidiously manipulated Musk into co-founding their spurious non-profit venture [by] promising that it would chart a safer, more open course than profit-driven tech giants.”
The lawsuit continued that Altman had told Musk that OpenAI’s non-profit structure would attract top scientists worldwide and counteract Google’s DeepMind by decentralising its AI technologies and “making it open source.”
It continued,
Once [OpenAI’s] technology approached transformative AGI, Altman flipped the narrative and proceeded to cash in. In partnership with Microsoft, Altman established an opaque web of for-profit OpenAI affiliates, engaged in rampant self-dealing, seized [its] Board, and systematically drained the non-profit of its valuable technology and personnel.
According to the lawsuit, the network’s total value of funding stood at around $100bn USD.
OpenAI Opens Up
Responding to a previous form of the lawsuit in May, OpenAI hit back at similar claims in an open letter, stating that the firm’s mission was to “ensure AGI benefits all of humanity” with “safe and beneficial AGI” and “helping create broadly distributed benefits.”
It added: “We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”
Explaining further, OpenAI stated that it had “realised building AGI will require far more resources than we’d initially imagined” and that Elon replied it should “announce an initial $1B funding commitment to OpenAI.”
In an email in “late 2015,” Elon had written as reported by OpenAI,
“We need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless… I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment… I will cover whatever anyone else doesn’t provide.”
OpenAI claimed at the time that developing AI would demand “vast quantities of compute,” placing strain on the companies capital source requirements and prompting its shift to a for-profit entity in 2017.
Furthermore, OpenAI’s letter alleges that Musk aimed to merge the company wiht Tesla or grant him full control. Following the for-profit scheme, Musk reportedly sought majority shares in equity, board, control, and to be appointed CEO and had “withheld funding” during talks.
Concluding, the letter stated,
“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him.”
Ex-OpenAI Board Member Spills the Tea
News of the internal conflict come just days after Helen Toner, former OpenAI Board Member and Director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, explored the corporate coup against Altman in November last year to the Financial Times.
She explained that the five-day coup kicked off despite “pressure from the start-up’s powerful investors, supporters and employees to reinstate Altman, and after his return, Toner was reportedly “forced to resign.”
Toner has remained a longstanding opponent of Altmen, the report noted, stating that it would be “very hard to look at what happened and conclude that self-governing is going to work at these companies.”
She added that power and incentives could also affect self-governance structures.
After OpenAI appointed her as a board member in 2021, she claimed on a Ted AI podcast that Altman clashed with her about a paper on AI governance and later, misled the board numerous times about its safety processes by withholding information, misrepresenting activities at the companies and “outright” deceiving the board.
Adding, she told FT,
“What changed it was conversations with senior executives that we had in the fall of 2023. That is where we started thinking and talking more actively about [doing] something about Sam specifically.”
Responding to the attempted coup at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January this year, Altman said that he was left “super confused” and “super caught off guard” by the incident.
Speaking at the Bloomberg House, he described to rapidly changing event in November last year, stating that he only considered returning after receiving phone calls from board members the next morning.
Currently, OpenAI is valued at roughly $86bn USD, although Altman has consistently refuted that he holds equity in the company, sources show.
The comments from reports and interviews published in this article do not reflect the opinions of DxM
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