OpenAI Announces Leadership Update

The ever-volatile OpenAI is changing yet again, with co-founder and CEO Sam Altman shifting his focus to research and products and other executives expanding their roles on the business side.

“OpenAI has grown a lot,” Mr. Altman writes in the announcement post. “We remain focused on the same core–pursuing frontier AI research that accelerates human progress–but we now also deliver products used by hundreds of millions of people. This real-world usage–in science, business, education, and more–helps make our research better and helps begin to deliver on our mission of AGI [artificial general intelligence] that benefits all of humanity.”

With Altman shifting his focus solely to the technical side and pursuing an OpenAI reorganization into a for-profit, public benefit corporation, three other executives now have expanded roles.

Mark Chen, previously the senior vice president of research, is now OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer. In this new role, he will “will drive scientific progress and make sure [the company] continues to push the frontier in capability and safety.”

Julia Villagra has been promoted to Chief People Officer and will “ensure that OpenAI remains the top destination for people who want to build AGI.”

But the biggest change, perhaps, involves Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer. He will continue in that role but assume Altman’s business-oriented responsibilities by overseeing the company’s day-to-day operations. “Brad will lead our global deployment, focusing on business strategy, key partnerships, infrastructure, and operational excellence to maximize the impact of our research,” Altman notes.

The changes come in the wake of several executive departures from OpenAI, including that of former Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, who left and created a new AI startup; her role will not be replaced. Former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and Open AI co-founder John Schulman have also left the firm in recent months.

Separately, OpenAI also announced that it has added new speech-to-text and text-to-speech audio models to its API, “making it possible to build more powerful, customizable, and intelligent voice agents that offer real value … The models are especially well-suited for use cases like customer call centers, meeting note transcription, and more.”