With the sudden simultaneous exits of Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, and Bob McGrew, I thought I’d update my tally of the departures from OpenAI, collated with how quickly the ex-employee had signed the loyalty letter to Sam Altman last November.
The letter was leaked at 505 signatures, 667 signatures, and finally 702 signatures; in the end, it was reported that 737 of 770 employees signed. Since then, I’ve been able to verify 56 departures of people who were full-time employees (as far as I can tell, contractors were not allowed to sign, but all FTEs were).
I still think I’m missing some, so these are lower bounds (modulo any mistakes I’ve made).
Headline numbers:
Attrition for the 505 OpenAI employees who signed before the letter was first leaked: at least 24⁄505 = 4.8%
Attrition for the next 197 to sign (it was leaked again at 667 signatures, and one last time at 702): at least 13⁄197 = 6.6%
Attrition for the (reported) 68 who had not signed by the last leak: at least 19⁄68 = 27.9%.
Reportedly, 737 out of the 770 signed in the end, and many of the Superalignment team chose not to sign at all.
Below are my current tallies of some notable subsets. Please comment with any corrections!
People from the Superalignment team who never signed as of the 702 leak (including some policy/governance people who seem to have been closely connected) and are now gone:
Carroll Wainwright
Collin Burns
Cullen O’Keefe
Daniel Kokotajlo
Jan Leike (though he did separately Tweet that the board should resign)
Jeffrey Wu
Jonathan Uesato
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Mati Roy
William Saunders
Yuri Burda
People from the Superalignment team (and close collaborators) who did sign before the final leak but are now gone:
Jan Hendrik Kirchner (signed between 668 and 702)
Steven Bills (signed between 668 and 702)
John Schulman (signed between 506 and 667)
Sherry Lachman (signed between 506 and 667)
Ilya Sutskever (signed by 505)
Pavel Izmailov (signed by 505)
Ryan Lowe (signed by 505)
Todor Markov (signed by 505)
Others who didn’t sign as of the 702 leak (some of whom may have just been AFK for the wrong weekend, though I doubt that was true of Karpathy) and are now gone:
Andrei Alexandru (Research Engineer)
Andrej Karpathy (Co-Founder)
Austin Wiseman (Finance/Accounting)
Girish Sastry (Policy)
Jay Joshi (Recruiting)
Katarina Slama (Member of Technical Staff)
Lucas Negritto (Member of Technical Staff, then Developer Community Ambassador)
Zarina Stanik (Marketing)
Notable other ex-employees:
Barrett Zoph (VP of Research, Post-Training; signed by 505)
Bob McGrew (Chief Research Officer; signed by 505)
Chris Clark (Head of Nonprofit and Strategic Initiatives; signed by 505)
There are a few people in this list who I think are being counted incorrectly as FTEs (Mati and Andrei, for example).
I would also be careful about making inferences based on timing of supposed signature: I have heard that the signature Google Doc had crashed and so the process for adding names was slow and cumbersome. That is, the time at which someone’s name was added may have been significantly after they expressed desire to sign.
And while failure to sign isn’t proof of lack of desire to sign, the two are heavily correlated—otherwise it would be incredibly unlikely for the small Superalignment team to have so many members who signed late or not at all.
With the sudden simultaneous exits of Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, and Bob McGrew, I thought I’d update my tally of the departures from OpenAI, collated with how quickly the ex-employee had signed the loyalty letter to Sam Altman last November.
The letter was leaked at 505 signatures, 667 signatures, and finally 702 signatures; in the end, it was reported that 737 of 770 employees signed. Since then, I’ve been able to verify 56 departures of people who were full-time employees (as far as I can tell, contractors were not allowed to sign, but all FTEs were).
I still think I’m missing some, so these are lower bounds (modulo any mistakes I’ve made).
Headline numbers:
Attrition for the 505 OpenAI employees who signed before the letter was first leaked: at least 24⁄505 = 4.8%
Attrition for the next 197 to sign (it was leaked again at 667 signatures, and one last time at 702): at least 13⁄197 = 6.6%
Attrition for the (reported) 68 who had not signed by the last leak: at least 19⁄68 = 27.9%.
Reportedly, 737 out of the 770 signed in the end, and many of the Superalignment team chose not to sign at all.
Below are my current tallies of some notable subsets. Please comment with any corrections!
People from the Superalignment team who never signed as of the 702 leak (including some policy/governance people who seem to have been closely connected) and are now gone:
Carroll Wainwright
Collin Burns
Cullen O’Keefe
Daniel Kokotajlo
Jan Leike (though he did separately Tweet that the board should resign)
Jeffrey Wu
Jonathan Uesato
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Mati Roy
William Saunders
Yuri Burda
People from the Superalignment team (and close collaborators) who did sign before the final leak but are now gone:
Jan Hendrik Kirchner (signed between 668 and 702)
Steven Bills (signed between 668 and 702)
John Schulman (signed between 506 and 667)
Sherry Lachman (signed between 506 and 667)
Ilya Sutskever (signed by 505)
Pavel Izmailov (signed by 505)
Ryan Lowe (signed by 505)
Todor Markov (signed by 505)
Others who didn’t sign as of the 702 leak (some of whom may have just been AFK for the wrong weekend, though I doubt that was true of Karpathy) and are now gone:
Andrei Alexandru (Research Engineer)
Andrej Karpathy (Co-Founder)
Austin Wiseman (Finance/Accounting)
Girish Sastry (Policy)
Jay Joshi (Recruiting)
Katarina Slama (Member of Technical Staff)
Lucas Negritto (Member of Technical Staff, then Developer Community Ambassador)
Zarina Stanik (Marketing)
Notable other ex-employees:
Barrett Zoph (VP of Research, Post-Training; signed by 505)
Bob McGrew (Chief Research Officer; signed by 505)
Chris Clark (Head of Nonprofit and Strategic Initiatives; signed by 505)
Diane Yoon (VP of People; signed by 505)
Gretchen Krueger (Policy; signed by 505; posted a significant Twitter thread at the time she left)
Mira Murati (CTO; signed by 505)
There are a few people in this list who I think are being counted incorrectly as FTEs (Mati and Andrei, for example).
I would also be careful about making inferences based on timing of supposed signature: I have heard that the signature Google Doc had crashed and so the process for adding names was slow and cumbersome. That is, the time at which someone’s name was added may have been significantly after they expressed desire to sign.
Mati described himself as a TPM since September 2023 (after being PM support since April 2022), and Andrei described himself as a Research Engineer from April 2023 to March 2024. Why do you believe either was not a FTE at the time?
And while failure to sign isn’t proof of lack of desire to sign, the two are heavily correlated—otherwise it would be incredibly unlikely for the small Superalignment team to have so many members who signed late or not at all.