Another former senior employee added: “Theoretically, there was some willingness to do other kinds of research, but directing resources to those things was made really difficult, so you always felt like a second-class citizen to the main bets.”

In January, Tworek, who led its efforts on the “reasoning” of AI models, left OpenAI after seven years, saying he wanted to explore “types of research that are hard to do at OpenAI.” He wanted to work on continuous learning—the ability of a model to learn from new data over time while retaining previously learned information.

People close to Tworek said his appeals for more resources such as computing power and staff were rejected by leadership, culminating in a stand-off with chief scientist Jakub Pachocki.

People familiar with the dispute said Pachocki disagreed with Tworek’s specific scientific approach and also believed that OpenAI’s existing AI “architecture” around LLMs was more promising.

Last month, Vallone, who led model policy research at OpenAI, joined rival Anthropic. Two people familiar with her exit said she was given an “impossible” mission of protecting the mental health of users becoming attached to ChatGPT. Vallone did not respond to a request for comment.

Cunningham left the economic research team last year, suggesting OpenAI was straying from impartial research to focus on work that promoted the company. His departure was first reported by Wired.

“The company is still making progress, but it is locked in a tight competition with Google and Anthropic, who have consensus stronger models, so they have less of a luxury to slow down because they could let competitors push ahead,” said a former employee.

Many investors are unconcerned about the risk that OpenAI falls behind rivals in the race to build advanced “frontier” models and products.

Jenny Xiao, a partner at Leonis Capital and former researcher at OpenAI, believes its advantage is the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT.

“Everyone’s obsessing over whether OpenAI has the best model,” she said. “That’s the wrong question. They’re converting technical leadership into platform lock-in. The moat has shifted from research to user behavior, and that’s a much stickier advantage.”

Additional reporting by George Hammond in San Francisco and Melissa Heikkilä in London

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