OpenAI’s chief research officer, Bob McGrew, and vice president of research, Barrett Joffe, left the company on Wednesday, hours after OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, announced she was leaving the company.
CEO Sam Altman revealed plans for a leadership shakeup via a post on X Wednesday evening, along with two recent departures.
“Mira, Bob and Barrett made these decisions independently and amicably,” he said. “But the timing of Mira’s decision was so good that it made sense to do everything at once so we could work together to ensure a smooth transition to the next generation of leadership.”
Altman said that Mark Chen, vice president of research, has been promoted to OpenAI’s new senior vice president of research and will lead the company’s research organization as chief scientist, working with Jakub Pachocki.
Matt Knight, previously head of security, will become OpenAI’s chief information security officer. And Kevin Weil, chief product officer, and Srinivas Narayanan, vice president of engineering, will continue to lead OpenAI’s applications team, which is responsible for delivering the company’s technology to both enterprise and consumer customers.
Research scientist Josh Archiam will take on a new role as mission coordinator, Altman said, and will work across the company to “make sure all the pieces and the culture are in place to be successful in the mission.”
“Mark, Jakub, Kevin, Srinivas, Matt and Josh will report to me,” Altman added. “I’ve spent most of my time in the non-technical side of the organization over the past year. I now look forward to spending most of my time on the technical and product side of the company.”
In his post, Altman sought to reassure employees and outside observers that the leadership change was simply the normal course of business.
“Leadership changes are a natural part of any business, especially one that is growing very quickly and is very demanding,” he said. “I won’t pretend that it’s natural for something to happen so suddenly, but we’re not a typical business, and the reasons that Mira explained to me—that there are no good times, that anything that wasn’t sudden would have leaked out, and that she wanted to do this when OpenAI was on the rise—make sense.”
McGrew simply said, “It’s time for (him) to take a break.”
“The last eight years at OpenAI have been a humbling and awe-inspiring journey,” he added in his post to X. “What started as a small nonprofit I joined in January 2017 has become one of the most important research and deployment companies in the world… I have great confidence in the leadership of (OpenAI).”
McGrew joined OpenAI as a technical staff member in 2017, was promoted to vice president of research and then chief research officer in 2018.
Zoph, who joined OpenAI in 2022, said in a separate post that it “felt like a natural time for me to explore new opportunities outside of OpenAI.”
Zoph led the post-training team that trained and improved OpenAI’s models before they were deployed in products like ChatGPT and OpenAI’s APIs, or to other OpenAI internal research teams.
“This is a personal decision based on how I want to take the next step in my career,” he added.
As OpenAI’s former executives put it: Publicly The split was amicable, but it comes on the heels of reports that OpenAI is planning to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit company, with Altman set to take a 7 percent stake.
Amid reports of a new funding round valuing OpenAI at $150 billion, disagreements over the company’s direction may have been the deciding factor.
OpenAI is having a plenary meeting on Thursday, so we’ll know more then.
McGrew, Zoph, and Murati are the latest senior executives to leave OpenAI in recent months. Distinguished research scientist Andrej Karpathy left in February, Sutskever and former safety chief Jan Leike announced their departures in May, and co-founder John Schulman said last month he was leaving to join rival Anthropic. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, is on extended leave until the end of the year.
Of the 13 people who helped found OpenAI in 2015, only three are still alive today.
“Being the leader of OpenAI is all-consuming,” Altman said in his post. “On the one hand, it’s a privilege to be part of the fastest-growing company that brings our advanced research to hundreds of millions of people. On the other hand, leading the team has been relentless, and they’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty.”
OpenAI’s press office did not respond to questions about the recent departures.
