- Most of OpenAI’s cofounders have left the startup, with some going to rivals.
- Since it was founded in 2015, it’s had controversies including the brief ousting of CEO Sam Altman.
- Here’s where all 11 of its cofounders are now and how many remain at the $157 billion company.
OpenAI has attracted billions of dollars from investors, but it has also lost many key figures — including some of its cofounders.
The startup was cofounded as a nonprofit research lab by a group of 11 people in 2015.
Since then, it has grown rapidly and amassed a wealth of users since it launched ChatGPT in 2022. In September, the $157 billion company said it has more than 1 million paying business users globally, a sharp increase from 600,000 in April.
Alongside its rapid growth, the company has been hit by a series of controversies over the years, like the brief ousting of its CEO, Sam Altman, in November 2023.
More recently, a wave of high-profile exits has put it in the spotlight, with executives like former CTO Mira Murati leaving last month. Barret Zoph, the vice president of research, and Bob McGrew, chief research officer, left on the same day as Murati.
OpenAI has also lost two cofounders this year: Ilya Sutskever, who announced his departure in May, and John Schulman, who defected to its rival Anthropic in August.
As of October 2024, the company had just three remaining cofounders, although one is on sabbatical until the end of the year.
Here’s where all of the 11 cofounders are now.
Sam Altman
Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images
Altman, who is the face of the world’s most high-profile startup, remains at OpenAI as its CEO. He was briefly ousted in November 2023, but after a dramatic few days, he returned and then created an entirely new board.
John Schulman
Schulman took over the position of overseeing OpenAI’s Superalignment team in May after Jan Leike left to join rival Anthropic. The team was tasked with mitigating AI risks.
But in August, Schulman announced in an X post that he made the “difficult decision” to leave OpenAI. Explaining the reasons behind his decisions, he wrote, “This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work.”
Wojciech Zaremba
Zaremba is one of the last few remaining cofounders at OpenAI, where he leads its robotics efforts.
In March, Zaremba said it was “sad” to witness Ekon Musk and Altman engage in an “unnecessary fight” after Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and some of its cofounders.
Zaremba wrote, “It would be so much better to put your creative energy into building the future you dream of over a quarrel. May you (both) be happy and find peace.”
Ilya Sutskever
JACK GUEZ/ Getty
Sutskever departed his role as chief scientist at OpenAI in May. The move came six months after reports suggested he played a key role in the brief ousting of Altman. Soon after, Sustkever said he “deeply” regretted participating in the board’s action against Altman.
In June, Sustskever announced in an X post that he was starting a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. The company aims to develop superintelligence safely, a form of AI capable of surpassing human intelligence. It has since raised $1 billion.
Greg Brockman
Brockman, president of OpenAI, said in a statement on X in August that he’s taking a sabbatical through year-end.
“First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build,” he wrote.
Durk Kingma
After over two years as a research scientist and team lead at OpenAI, Kingma joined Google DeepMind in 2018. In October, he announced in an X post that he was joining Anthropic.
He said its approach to developing AI “resonates significantly” with his own beliefs. According to his LinkedIn profile, Kingma will work on machine learning research.
Andrej Karpathy
San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images
Research scientist Karpathy has had two stints working at OpenAI. The first time he left was in 2017, to join Tesla. He then boomeranged back to OpenAI in 2023, before leaving a year later to launch AI education startup Eureka Labs.
Vicki Cheung
Cheung left OpenAI in 2017 to join the ride-hailing firm Lyft after she spent two years as the startup’s head of infrastructure and a founding engineer. She is now the chief technology officer of the machine learning firm Gantry, which she cofounded with another former OpenAI researcher.
Elon Musk
ALAIN JOCARD/ Getty Images
The billionaire runs Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and he founded the AI startup xAI in 2023.
Musk sued OpenAI in February, accusing the ChatGPT maker of abandoning its founding mission. In a blog post OpenAI published after Musk sued the company, the ChatGPT maker said he left in February 2018. However, Musk’s lawyers argued in the first lawsuit that he “continued to make contributions to OpenAI” until mid-September 2020.
Musk dropped the lawsuit in June and then filed a fresh lawsuit in August, with his lawyers arguing he was “assiduously manipulated” by Altman and Brockman into cofounding OpenAI.
Pamela Vagata
Vagata is one of the lesser-known cofounders of OpenAI. Nor does she include the company on her LinkedIn profile.
However, she was listed as a founding member on an early version of the company’s website. According to her LinkedIn profile, she used to work at Facebook as an AI research engineer before joining Stripe as a software engineer in 2016. She left in 2019 as an AI tech lead. In 2021, she became a founding partner at venture capital firm Pebblebed.
Trevor Blackwell
Blackwell left the company in 2017. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is a roboticist and was a partner at Y Combinator until 2020. His personal website states that he’s “working on better ways to program robots.”
OpenAI and none of its 11 cofounders immediately responded to Business Insider’s requests for comment, made outside normal working hours.
