By my assessment, the employees who failed to sign the final leaked version of the Altman loyalty letter have now been literally decimated.
I’m trying to track the relative attrition for a Manifold market: of the 265 OpenAI employees who hadn’t yet signed the loyalty letter by the time it was first leaked, what percent will still be at OpenAI on the one-year anniversary?
I’m combining that first leaked copy with 505 signatures, the final leaked copy with 702 signatures, the oft-repeated total headcount of 770, and this spreadsheet tracking OpenAI departures (albeit with many false positives—people self-reporting as OpenAI employees because they customized their GPTs—so I’m working to verify names that appear on the spreadsheet but not on the letter; I’m sure the spreadsheet has false negatives as well, alas).
So far, I’ve verified at least seven[update: seven, with a probable eighth] departures of eligible figures who hadn’t signed the letter with 702 names: Leopold Aschenbrenner, Jay Joshi (not fully verified by me), Andrej Karpathy, Daniel Kokotajlo, Jan Leike, Lucas Negritto, Katarina Slama, and William Saunders. If it’s true that the total headcount at the time was 770, then that’s 8 out of 68, or 11.8%.
Compare that to the attrition rate (as per the spreadsheet) for those who had signed the final leaked version but not the first: 10 departures out of 197, or 5.1%; and compare that to the attrition rate for those who signed promptly: 13 departures out of 505, or 2.6%.
Any causal inferences from this correlation are left as an exercise to the reader.
(A more important exercise, however: can anyone find a confirmation of the 770 number outside of unsourced media reports, or find a copy of the loyalty letter with more than 702 signatories, or ideally find a list of everyone at OpenAI at the time? I’ve tried a few different avenues without success.)
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)
I am, for now, not doing further research when the spreadsheet lists a person whose name appears on the final leaked letter; so it’s possible that some of the 23 departures among the 702 names on the final leaked letter are spurious. (I will be more thorough when I resolve the market after November.)
I am counting only full-time employees and not counting contractors, as I currently believe that the 770 figure refers only to full-time employees. So far, I’ve seen no contractors among those who signed, but I’ve only checked a few; if the letter includes some categories of contractors, this gets a lot harder to resolve.
I am counting nontechnical employees (e.g. recruiting, marketing) as well as technical staff, because such employees were among those who signed the letter.
By my assessment, the employees who failed to sign the final leaked version of the Altman loyalty letter have now been literally decimated.
I’m trying to track the relative attrition for a Manifold market: of the 265 OpenAI employees who hadn’t yet signed the loyalty letter by the time it was first leaked, what percent will still be at OpenAI on the one-year anniversary?
I’m combining that first leaked copy with 505 signatures, the final leaked copy with 702 signatures, the oft-repeated total headcount of 770, and this spreadsheet tracking OpenAI departures (albeit with many false positives—people self-reporting as OpenAI employees because they customized their GPTs—so I’m working to verify names that appear on the spreadsheet but not on the letter; I’m sure the spreadsheet has false negatives as well, alas).
So far, I’ve verified at least
seven[update: seven, with a probable eighth] departures of eligible figures who hadn’t signed the letter with 702 names: Leopold Aschenbrenner, Jay Joshi (not fully verified by me), Andrej Karpathy, Daniel Kokotajlo, Jan Leike, Lucas Negritto, Katarina Slama, and William Saunders. If it’s true that the total headcount at the time was 770, then that’s 8 out of 68, or 11.8%.Compare that to the attrition rate (as per the spreadsheet) for those who had signed the final leaked version but not the first: 10 departures out of 197, or 5.1%; and compare that to the attrition rate for those who signed promptly: 13 departures out of 505, or 2.6%.
Any causal inferences from this correlation are left as an exercise to the reader.
(A more important exercise, however: can anyone find a confirmation of the 770 number outside of unsourced media reports, or find a copy of the loyalty letter with more than 702 signatories, or ideally find a list of everyone at OpenAI at the time? I’ve tried a few different avenues without success.)
“decimate” is one of those relatively rare words where the literal meaning is much less scary than the figurative meaning.
The literal meaning does actually include killing people and nobody at OpenAI got killed.
Isn’t it the opposite? To decimate = to kill 1 in 10 soldiers, figuratively to remove a certain fraction of elements from a set.
Figuratively it is used as “to kill 9 in 10”.
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)
Note on current methodology:
I am, for now, not doing further research when the spreadsheet lists a person whose name appears on the final leaked letter; so it’s possible that some of the 23 departures among the 702 names on the final leaked letter are spurious. (I will be more thorough when I resolve the market after November.)
I am counting only full-time employees and not counting contractors, as I currently believe that the 770 figure refers only to full-time employees. So far, I’ve seen no contractors among those who signed, but I’ve only checked a few; if the letter includes some categories of contractors, this gets a lot harder to resolve.
I am counting nontechnical employees (e.g. recruiting, marketing) as well as technical staff, because such employees were among those who signed the letter.