Only 4 of OpenAI’s 11 Founders Are Still With the Company—Where Are the Rest of Them?
In November of 2022, the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked an A.I. revolution. The chatbot drew one million users in less than a week and 100 million a year after its release. Regarded as a leader in the A.I. race, the company is now pursuing artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.), a form of A.I. that matches or surpasses human intelligence across a wide range of cognitive tasks.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 initially as a nonprofit pursuing the development of A.I. in “a way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” the company said. Co-chaired by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, it counted prominent A.I. researchers like Ilya Sutskever among its founding team of research engineers and scientists. It claimed to have $1 billion committed from funders like Musk, Altman, Peter Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Nearly eight years later, its model has shifted to include a capped-profit subsidiary.
Only four of OpenAI’s original 11 founding employees remain with the company. The rest are spread across the tech world, working for rival A.I. companies, startups and venture capital firms.
Here’s a look at where OpenAI’s 11 founding members are today:
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Sam Altman today is seen as the public face of OpenAI. But he didn’t always play such a significant role. At the time of OpenAI’s founding, Altman juggled his duties as co-chair of the company and as the president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator.
This changed in 2019 when Altman left Y Combinator. Since then, he has been OpenAI’s full-time CEO—except for a brief stint in November when OpenAI’s board ousted him over claims he had not been “consistently candid.” Following pushback from OpenAI investors and employees, Altman eventually got his job back and overhauled the entire board.
Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI
Before co-founding OpenAI, Greg Brockman was the chief technology officer of the fintech company Stripe. Brockman connected with Altman in 2015 through Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, and the two began discussing how they could build safe human-level A.I. systems.
Later that year, they were joined by Musk, Sutskever and others at a dinner where the concept of OpenAI was first articulated. “We’d each come to the dinner with our ideas, but Elon and Sam had a crisp vision of building safe A.I. in a project dedicated to benefiting humanity,” recalled Brockman in a 2017 blog post.
Brockman started off as OpenAI’s chief technology officer and has since risen the ranks to become president of the company. He briefly quit during Altman’s November ouster but returned once Altman was reinstated.
John Schulman, head of alignment science at OpenAI
John Schulman’s involvement with OpenAI began shortly after he completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. “I wanted to do research in A.I., and I thought that OpenAI was ambitious in its mission and was already thinking about artificial general intelligence (A.G.I),” he told Berkeley in a 2023 interview.
He played a pivotal role in creating OpenAI’s ChatGPT by leading the company’s reinforcement training team, which trains A.I. agents to display optimal behavior. In a recent podcast, the researcher predicted that A.I. could replace his job in five years.
Following the May departure of Jan Leike, who previously ran OpenAI’s Super Alignment team to oversee long-term risks, Schulman became head of the company’s alignment science efforts. Later that month, he was appointed a member of OpenAI’s newly formed safety committee.
Wojciech Zaremba, lead of language and code generation teams at OpenAI
Wojciech Zaremba, a Polish computer scientist, became a co-founder of OpenAI while he was still completing his Ph.D. in deep learning at New York University with internships at Nvidia, Google (GOOGL) and Meta (META) under his belt. Shortly before OpenAI’s launch, Zaremba received a flurry of offers from competitors looking to snap up A.I. talent. “The amount of money was borderline crazy,” he told Wired in 2016.
During a 2021 podcast, Wojciech recalled oversleeping for an initial meeting with Brockman in 2015 to discuss the startup. He was introduced to fellow co-founders Altman, Sutskever, Schulman and Karpathy at a get-together in Napa, Calif., where the group discussed their thoughts on A.G.I.
Zaremba spent his early years at OpenAI leading its robotics efforts, which notably produced a robotic arm capable of solving a Rubik’s Cube. The team was dissolved in 2020, and Zaremba now leads teams overseeing OpenAI’s GPT models, its coding assistant Github Copilot and programming model Codex.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and founder of xAI
Elon Musk helped create OpenAI almost a decade ago in a bid to challenge Google’s monopoly on A.I. talent. He met Atlman through Y Combinator partner Geoff Ralston. He donated millions towards the initial nonprofit OpenAI.
Musk stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2018, partly due to a failed attempt to incorporate OpenAI into Tesla (TSLA). His relationship with the organization has only continued to sour, with Musk publicly disparaging the safety of OpenAI’s technology and threatening to ban Apple devices at his companies following Apple’s recent partnership with OpenAI.
Earlier this year, Musk sued OpenAI and Altman, claiming that the company prioritizes profit over its original mission to benefit humanity in a lawsuit that has since been dropped. Last year, he started his own A.I. startup, xAI, which launched a ChatGPT rival known as Grok and raised $6 billion in venture funding in May.
Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Ilya Sutskever, regarded as one of the world’s top experts in machine learning, first made waves in the field by co-inventing the convolutional neural network AlexNet in 2012 while studying for his doctoral degree at the University of Toronto under renowned A.I. academic Geoffrey Hinton.
He joined Google as a research assistant in 2013 after the tech giant acquired an A.I. lab started by Hinton, Sutskever and another student. Musk poached Sutskever in 2015, and in a recent podcast, he described hiring Him as “one of the toughest recruiting battles I’ve ever had.” He started as OpenAI’s research director and became its chief scientist in 2018.
Sutskever left OpenAI in May, six months after his unsuccessful attempt to oust Altman. Last month Sutskever announced plans to launch his own A.I. company, called Safe Superintelligence, Inc. As its name suggests, the startup will prioritize safety as it develops A.I. systems that may outsmart humans.
Trevor Blackwell, roboticist
Trevor Blackwell is a Canadian computer programmer and one of the co-founders of Y Combinator, where he met Altman. Blackwell worked at OpenAI as one of its founding researchers until 2017 while serving as a Y Combinator partner until 2020.
Blackwell is also a renowned roboticist. In 2007, he built the world’s first dynamically balancing biped robot and led the robotics company Anybots from 2001 to 2012. He has also built a two-wheeled balancing scooter and self-balancing electric unicycle as side projects.
Vicki Cheung, co-founder and chief technology officer of Gantry
Before joining OpenAI, Vicki Cheung was one of the founding engineers of Duolingo and spent a year as a software engineer at TrueVault.
She got in touch with OpenAI when it was still in stealth mode. “It was just me and Greg Brockman working in his apartment,” recalled Cheung during a 2021 podcast about OpenAI’s early days. She also noted that OpenAI “didn’t really have an interview process” at the time.
Cheung spent two years as head of infrastructure at the company before leaving for a software engineer job at Lyft in 2018. Cheung left Lyft in 2020 to co-found Gantry alongside Josh Tobin, another early OpenAI employee. The startup aids companies in analyzing and improving the performances of machine learning models.
Andrej Karpathy, pursuing personal projects
Andrej Karpathy has had two stints at OpenAI in the past eight years. The Slovak-Canadian scientist started as a founding research scientist focused on deep learning in computer vision, generative modeling and reinforcement learning. During a 2016 Q&A on Quora, Karpathy said Musk visited OpenAI weekly and described him as “nice, personable, light-hearted and fully invested in the conversation when he talks with you.” In 2017, Tesla poached him to oversee neural networks for its Autopilot system.
Karpathy returned to OpenAI in 2023 but left once again in February. In an X post, Karpathy clarified that his decision to leave was “not a result of any particular event, issue or drama,” adding that he will work on personal projects for now.
Durk Kingma, a research scientist at Google DeepMind
Durk Kingma’s initial experiences with A.I. included working in the research lab at New York University from 2009 to 2012 under Yann LeCun, now the chief A.I. scientist at Meta. He also spent the summers of 2014 and 2015 working at DeepMind (acquired by Google in 2024) while completing a Ph.D in deep learning and generative models at the University of Amsterdam.
Kingma subsequently joined OpenAI, where he led its Algorithms team. He left the company in 2018 for Google Brain, which has since merged with DeepMind into a new entity called Google DeepMind. There, he continues to work as a research scientist focused on generative models for text, images and video.
Pamela Vagata, founder of the VC firm Pebblebed
Acting as one of the only two female members of OpenAI’s founding team, Pamela Vagata’s career in tech began with a software development engineer stint at Microsoft. She then spent six years at Facebook, including two working as an A.I. research engineer.
While the specifics of Vagata’s initial role at OpenAI are unclear, she played a crucial role in its foundational infrastructure and early products, according to a bio on the nonprofit Foresight Institute. Her time at OpenAI was short-lived, as she joined Stripe in 2016 as one of its A.I. tech leads. Vagata has since founded Pebblebed, a venture capital firm created in 2021 specializing in early-stage A.I. investments.