Since Sam Altman was fired as CEO of OpenAI on November 17, at least three senior researchers have left the company.
Following the sudden resignation of its founder, Sam Altman, on November 17, there has been an increasing amount of turmoil at OpenAI, as three senior researchers have reportedly left the artificial intelligence company.
In a blog post, OpenAI’s board of directors declared Altman’s dismissal as CEO, saying he “was not consistently honest in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” The post states that Mira Murati, the chief technology officer, is currently serving as the acting CEO.
Since then, the company has experienced a wave of resignations due to the decision. A few hours later, OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman made his resignation public. Senior employees at OpenAI, such as senior researcher Szymon Sidor, head of preparedness Aleksander Madry, and director of research Jakub Pachocki, have reportedly also resigned.
Along with Altman’s dismissal, at least one employee was let go. Additionally laid off was Alex Cohen, who was in charge of creating presentations for the board of directors of OpenAI. According to Cohen on X (formerly Twitter), “No one has told me why I was let go but Sam texted me ‘wtf’ and next thing I know my Slack and Gmail were disabled.” Cohen also predicted that more employees of OpenAI would quit in the next few days:
“I’d wager that 40% of OpenAI employees are currently looking at new roles. Sam and Greg were a big reason people joined the company and without them there I don’t know why they’d stay.”
Disagreements with OpenAI’s chief scientist and co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, are thought to be the cause of Altman’s termination, especially with regard to new funding and AI development.
With the recent events, it’s unclear what Altman will do next. As the creator of the cryptocurrency project Worldcoin, Tools for Humanity, he has received approaches to join other projects. Altman has been invited by Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, to participate in the decentralised large language model (LLM) of the ecosystem.