OpenAI is prioritizing the advancement of ChatGPT over more long-term research, prompting the departure of senior staff as the $500 billion company adapts to stiff competition from rivals such as Google and Anthropic.
The San Francisco-based start-up has reallocated resources for experimental work in favor of advances to the large language models that power its flagship chatbot, according to 10 current and former employees.
Among those to leave OpenAI in recent months over the strategic shift are vice-president of research Jerry Tworek, model policy researcher Andrea Vallone, and economist Tom Cunningham.
The changes at OpenAI mark an important shift for a group where ChatGPT emerged from a research preview in 2022 before igniting the generative AI boom.
Led by chief executive Sam Altman, it is evolving from a research lab into one of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. That means the company must prove to investors it will earn the revenues needed to justify a $500 billion valuation.
“OpenAI is trying to treat language models now as an engineering problem where they’re scaling up compute and scaling up algorithms and data, and they’re eking out really big gains from doing that,” one person familiar with its research ambitions said.
“But if you want to do original blue-sky research, it is quite tough. And if you don’t find yourself in one of the teams in the centre, it becomes increasingly political.”
OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, rejected the characterization. He said that “long-term, foundational research remains central to OpenAI and continues to account for the majority of our compute and investment, with hundreds of bottom-up projects exploring long-horizon questions beyond any single product.”