OpenAI faces turmoil: Co-founder departs, Brockman steps away amidst Musk lawsuit

OpenAI is navigating a challenging period marked by leadership upheaval and renewed legal battles. Elon Musk has revived an old lawsuit against the AI company, coinciding with significant internal changes: one co-founder has left for a rival startup, and another is taking an extended leave.

These developments have cast a shadow over OpenAI’s future, raising questions about its direction and stability.

Leadership changes at OpenAI

The president and co-founder of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, is taking an extended break from work. As per his statement, he needs to ‘recharge’ before he can continue contributing to the company again.

I’m taking a sabbatical through end of year. First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build.

— Greg Brockman (@gdb) August 6, 2024

While Brockman is only taking a temporary break, his colleague John Schulman has decided to leave the company and join another AI startup Anthropic. He pinned his decision on the desire to ensure AI behaves as intended and to focus on more hands-on work.

I’ve decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in.

John Schulman.

Schulman had played a pivotal role in creating ChatGPT, a popular generative AI platform. He leads the reinforcement training organization, which ensures AI models can follow human instructions well.

As things stand, OpenAI is currently left with only two of its original co-founders: CEO Sam Altman and Wojciech Zaremba.

Elon Musk’s lawsuit

Many people forget that Elon Musk was also an original co-founder of the company. Perhaps that is why he takes so much interest in how the company is run. He has reignited a legal battle against the company, accusing Sam Altman and Brockman of breaching their foundational agreement.

The crux of the lawsuit is that these two people are prioritizing business over the general public’s good. Musk believes OpenAI should be developing safe AI for the public, not AI for profit.

It is OpenAI’s collaboration with Microsoft that has turned the company into a vehicle for profit. Microsoft, for obvious reasons, wants to make more money by collaborating with OpenAI. That is hard for OpenAI to support without deviating from its foundation mission.

The lawsuit is likely to hinder OpenAI’s pursuit of becoming the leader in AI. Altman has reaffirmed that the company will allocate resources toward AI safety research. But the departure of two important people has raised the question of whether everyone in the company is on the same page.

OpenAI is facing both legal and internal pressures. Whether one is the consequence of the other is anyone’s guess. What we do know is that the company needs to resolve both issues, or it could soon become irrelevant in an industry that is developing faster than people and authorities can keep track of.