Computer scientist Aleksander Madry is exiting ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI.

"I want to share that I've decided to leave OpenAI. Needless to say, this was not an easy decision to make. I've spent almost three years at OpenAI and, let me tell you, it has been the experience of a lifetime," Madry wrote in a post on X.

Madry joined OpenAI in 2024 as one of the company's top safety executives. He served as head of preparedness. A bio of Madry on a Princeton University AI initiative website described the team as protecting against “catastrophic risks related to frontier AI models,"

He was later reassigned to a job focused on AI reasoning, CNBC reported at the time.

Madry was also the director of MIT's Center for Deployable Machine Learning and a faculty co-lead of the MIT AI Policy forum, although he is currently on leave. 

"It's time to do something new. I believe one of AI's biggest impacts will be in transforming the economy—how companies understand, decide and operate. OpenAI's technology is already beginning to do just that, it is extraordinary, and I now want to focus on investing and building what comes next," Madry noted in the X post.

AI Talent Shuffle

Earlier this week, one of OpenAI's founding members, Andrej Karpathy, joined Anthropic. Karpathy left OpenAI in February 2024 to launch education startup Eureka Labs.

The ChatGPT marker plans to nearly double its workforce to 8,000 from 4,5000 by the end of the year, the Financial Times reported. The company plans to add headcount across product development, engineering, research and sales.

OpenAI is also stepping up recruitment for "technical ambassadorship" roles aimed at helping businesses get more value from its tools, the report added.

Despite winning its $180 billion lawsuit against Elon Musk, OpenAI missed user growth targets earlier this year, and its CFO has openly worried about paying for compute.

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