AI labs are struggling to retain their employees. The recent major news in AI was the sudden and seemingly contentious departure of three top executives from Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines lab. All three were quickly hired by OpenAI, and they may not be the last to leave. Reports indicate that two more employees are expected to depart for OpenAI in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, Anthropic continues to attract alignment researchers away from OpenAI. One of OpenAI’s senior safety research leads, Andrea Vallone, has left the company for Anthropic. Vallone specializes in how AI models respond to mental health issues, a particularly sensitive topic for OpenAI following its recent problems with sycophancy. Vallone will be working under alignment researcher Jan Leike, who himself left OpenAI in 2024 over concerns the company was not taking safety seriously enough.
To cap off the flurry of moves, OpenAI made a significant hire of its own. Max Stoiber, formerly the director of engineering at Shopify, will be joining the company. He is set to work on OpenAI’s long-rumored operating system as part of what he describes as a small, high-agency team.