With the sudden simultaneous exits of Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, and Bob McGrew, I thought I’d do a more thorough scan of the departures. 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)
EDIT: On reflection, I made this a full Shortform post.
With the sudden simultaneous exits of Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, and Bob McGrew, I thought I’d do a more thorough scan of the departures. 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)
Mira Murati (CTO; signed by 505)