Business
OpenAI Exodus: Senior Staff Leave as Company Shifts Hard to ChatGPT
Multiple departures from video and image teams reveal tensions as the $500 billion company abandons experimental research for immediate commercial gains.
Multiple departures from video and image teams reveal tensions as the $500 billion company abandons experimental research for immediate commercial gains.
Jerry Tworek spent seven years building OpenAI's reasoning models. By January, he was gone. The VP of Research's exit, first reported by Business Today, came after what The Times of India described as a standoff with Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki over the company's research direction. Tworek cited pursuing work that was hard to do at OpenAI under its current commercial pressure.
The week also brought news of a broader exodus from OpenAI's experimental teams, particularly those working on Sora video generation and DALL-E image creation. According to The Irish Times and Computing UK, the company has entered code red mode in response to Google's Gemini 3, triggering a massive resource reallocation that has left non-ChatGPT teams less resourced.
MLQ.ai reports that OpenAI is redirecting resources from Sora and DALL-E directly to ChatGPT work. Computing UK's sources describe teams struggling to secure basic computing resources, with the Sora team reportedly suffering from reduced compute credits that hinder their work on video diffusion models.
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Andrea Vallone, The former Head of Model Policy, left for rival Anthropic's alignment team in January, according to Techmeme. MLQ.ai reports she faced an impossible mission regarding user emotional attachment to AI, a safety concern that becomes more pressing as ChatGPT dominates the company's focus. Her move to Anthropic, which emphasizes AI safety and alignment research, underscores what appears to be a philosophical split within the industry.
NextBigWhat reports that following Sora 2's late 2025 release, the app is seeing declining user activity and downloads. The downturn coincides with these internal resource cuts, suggesting the company may be reallocating priorities away from video the platform.
Tom Cunningham, an economist at OpenAI, has also departed according to Computing UK. The breadth of exits, spanning research, policy, and economics, suggests a fundamental shift in what OpenAI's priorities
The pattern emerging from these departures suggests OpenAI has made a choice to focus away from less profitable parts of its business its ChatGPT market position & pivot to applications like codings. Whether this will preserve the company's dominance or cede the future to more ambitious competitors remains an open question.