The war for artificial intelligence is getting personal.
In recent days, after multiple OpenAI researchers left the company for Meta, one remaining employee publicly broke down. “Not too many people outside the company know how talented and hardcore they are,” Cheng Lu, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, posted on X on June 29, commenting on a post announcing that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, or “Zuck,” had poached four elite Chinese researchers.
He continued: “Such a huge loss to OpenAI and I feel really disappointed that the leadership didn’t keep them.”
The post, which was later deleted, quickly went viral. It revealed something Silicon Valley prefers to keep hidden: the emotional and psychological cost of building the so-called future of intelligence.
Even OpenAI employees confirm the extent of the loss of reserachers to Meta. pic.twitter.com/bsZe21FRpu — Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) June 29, 2025
This raw display of employee grief comes as WIRED reports that OpenAI is shutting down for the entire week, forcing its staff to rest and recharge after a relentless push toward creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Internally, it’s being framed as a much-needed break. But for a company locked in a brutal talent war, this mandatory vacation feels less like a wellness initiative and more like a panic button.
The narrative of a looming burnout crisis has been quietly building for months. The mission to build a god-like intelligence is not a standard nine to five job. Reports from within the industry describe grueling, 80-hour workweeks as the baseline for researchers at top AI labs. This work has become a crusade, demanding total devotion from its acolytes. For years, the promise of achieving AGI, a technology that could solve all of humanity’s problems, was enough to fuel this sacrifice. The mission itself was the compensation.
But now, that faith is being tested. The catalyst for this apparent crisis is Meta. While OpenAI engineers are tweeting like they’ve lost loved ones, Zuckerberg is reportedly assembling a new elite AI team, stocked with former OpenAI and Google DeepMind talent. It’s a quiet, methodical power play that may eventually tilt the AI landscape in his favor, especially if OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, keeps bleeding expertise.
This is what the “AI revolution” actually looks like in 2025. Not just lines of code and chatbot demos, but emotional breakdowns, brain drain, and billionaires treating research labs like fantasy football teams.
OpenAI’s burnout problem isn’t new, but it is becoming harder to hide. The company has weathered multiple executive departures over the past two years, including the dramatic and brief firing of CEO Sam Altman, a crisis that exposed persistent internal tensions over safety, speed, and power.
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