Something is rotten in the state of OpenAI

There has been increasing media interest in the fact that only two of OpenAI’s 11 founders remain with the company, suggesting that all is far from well in an outfit that has seen uprisings to oust the boss, to further unrest a few days later to get him to return.

Apparently, creating a not-for-profit company with a mission to make the world a better place, only to later retract everything, is obviously not easy for many of the company’s original team.

And of course, when you have disrupted an entire industry, your skills are in demand, and you feel that your company is undermining your mission in life, you have options: from taking legal action, as Elon Musk has done, or moving to Anthropic, as John Schulman and others have done, or setting up your own outfit, like Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy or Pam Vagata; or taking a sabbatical, as Greg Brockman announced a few days ago. OpenAI’s logo looks like it’s rolling down a hill, and who knows what lies at the bottom.

This is a company that has changed the world, taking AI to unprecedented adoption levels in record time, and yet it seems a very unhappy place to work. Maybe Peter Drucker was right: culture eats strategy for breakfast, but if you sign up for a project that seduces you with its open, altruistic approach aimed at changing the world, and after a few years you…