The OpenAI brain drain has become meme fodder in the tech world

And then, of course, there are the social media memes poking fun at the high-profile departures that took place this year.

One VC joked that OpenAI didn’t have a C-suite.

Others pointed to a 2023 Wired magazine cover featuring Altman CEO Murati, former chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman, the company’s president and co-founder. Wired, at the time, called OpenAI’s executives “the AI ​​masters of the world.”

Of the four, only Altman and Brockman remain with the company, and Brockman is on extended leave until the end of the year.

Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI in May and launched his own security-focused AI startup.

The snark on X, meanwhile, has reached critical mass.

Hours after Murati announced his departure, two other OpenAi departures were announced on X: Bob McGrew, the company’s director of research, and Barret Zoph, vice president of research.

The management team includes CFO Sarah Friar; Chief Scientist Officer Jakub Pachocki, who replaced Sutskever: Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap; and Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil.

Of OpenAI’s 11 co-founders since 2015, only Altman, Brockman (who, again, is on leave) and Wojciech Zaremba remain.

One of the co-founders, Elon Musk, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. Musk dropped it, then reopened the suit in August, saying he believed he was helping start a nonprofit and that he had been “duped.”

OpenAI responded to the lawsuit, telling Business Insider in a statement in August: “As we said about Elon’s initial legal filing, which was later withdrawn, Elon’s previous emails continue to speak for themselves.”

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI on the departures of McGrew and Zoph.

The brain drain also included other high-profile departures, including former researcher and alignment chief Jan Leike, who announced his resignation in May, shortly after Sutskever.

Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders, who previously worked on OpenAI’s governance and security teams respectively, left OpenAI in the first half of 2023.

Additionally, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman left in August to join OpenAI rival Anthropic — where Leike also landed. And another co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, left in February 2024.

In August, Kokotajlo said about half of the people focused on AI safety had left the company.

“It wasn’t like a coordinated thing,” he told Fortune. “I think people have given up individually.”

OpenAI, which was founded in 2015, has been the dominant player in the AI ​​race since the release of ChatGPT in late November 2022. Since then, it has released more sophisticated versions of ChatGPT, its DALL-E text-to-image model, and GPT. 4o. The startup also announced a voice assistant, a text-to-video model called Sora, and its most sophisticated AI model, the o1, which the startup said can argue.

But rivals – including some OpenAI investors like Microsoft – are catching up. On Wednesday, Meta announced that Meta AI is on track to become “the world’s most used AI assistant.”

OpenAI’s latest funding round — which would bring its valuation to $150 billion — is now nearly complete and could include investors like Apple and Nvidia, according to Bloomberg.

And Altman, according to Reuters and Bloomberg, could have a big payday with a reported company restructuring that would move the startup from its current nonprofit status.