Category:Former OpenAI Employees
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in San Francisco in December 2015. This roster is defined less by who works there than by who left: the chief scientist who went on to found a rival laboratory, the vice president of research who founded another, the founding research staff member who went to Tesla, and the interim chief executive whose tenure lasted three days. Against that, the entries covering the company's current leadership are a comparatively short list.
Background
OpenAI was established at the end of 2015 as a nonprofit research organization with the stated mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity, backed by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman among others. It later adopted a capped-profit structure and shipped ChatGPT, which moved the organization from a research laboratory into a consumer software company. The November 2023 removal and reinstatement of Altman, which produced three chief executives inside a single week, is the event most of the biographies in this category have to account for.
The founding cohort and where it went
Ilya Sutskever co-invented AlexNet with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton before leaving Google in December 2015 to co-found OpenAI, where he served as chief scientist and oversaw the research behind its large language models. He left to found Safe Superintelligence Inc. Dario Amodei rose to vice president of research at the company and left to found Anthropic, where he is chief executive. Daniela Amodei was vice president of safety and policy at OpenAI and co-founded Anthropic with him, serving as its president. Andrej Karpathy joined the founding research staff in 2015 and left in 2017 to direct artificial intelligence at Tesla, where he led the team building Autopilot.
Emmett Shear belongs to the same section for a different reason. He had co-founded Justin.tv and run Twitch for more than a decade when he was named interim chief executive of OpenAI in November 2023, immediately after Altman's removal, making him the company's third chief executive inside three days. Employees and investors forced Altman's reinstatement and the appointment ended almost as quickly as it began.
The current leadership
Greg Brockman co-founded the company after serving as chief technology officer of Stripe and remains its president. Fidji Simo joined in 2025 as chief executive of applications, having previously run the Facebook app at Meta and then Instacart. Sarah Friar became chief financial officer in June 2024, after serving as chief financial officer of Square and chief executive of Nextdoor. Alex Heath covers the company rather than working for it, reporting on artificial intelligence first at The Verge and then through the Sources newsletter and podcast.
See also
This category currently contains no pages or media.