And then, of course, there are the memes on social media that make fun of this year’s celebrity departures.

One VC joked that OpenAI lacks leadership.

Others pointed to a 2023 Wired magazine cover featuring CEO Altman, Murati, former chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman, the company’s president and co-founder. Wired then called OpenAI’s executives the world’s “AI overlords.”

Of the four, only Altman and Brockman are still with the company, and Brockman is on extended leave until the end of the year.

Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI in May and founded his own AI startup with a focus on security.

The taunts against X have now reached a critical mass.

A few hours after Murati announced her departure, the departures of two other OpenAi employees were announced on X: Bob McGrew, the company’s chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, vice president of research.

The management team also includes CFO Sarah Friar, Chief Scientist Officer Jakub Pachocki, who replaced Sutskever, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap and Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil.

Of the eleven co-founders of OpenAI in 2015, only Altman, Brockman (who is again on leave), and Wojciech Zaremba remain.

One of the co-founders, Elon Musk, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. Musk dropped the suit and then re-filed it in August, saying he believed he was helping to launch a nonprofit and was “deceived.”

OpenAI responded to the lawsuit, telling Business Insider in a statement in August: “As we said about Elon’s initial lawsuit filing, which was later withdrawn, Elon’s previous emails continue to speak for themselves.”

OpenAI did not immediately respond to BI’s request for comment on the departures of McGrew and Zoph.

The brain drain also included other departures of high-ranking figures, including former researcher and director of orientation Jan Leike, who announced his resignation in May, shortly after Sutskever.

Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders, who previously worked on OpenAI’s governance and security teams, respectively, left OpenAI in the first half of 2023.

In addition, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman left the company in August to join OpenAI competitor Anthropic – where Leike also ended up. And another co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, left the company in February 2024.

In August, Kokotajlo said about half of the employees responsible for AI security had left the company.

“It wasn’t a coordinated thing,” he told Fortune. “I think people are just giving up one by one.”

OpenAI, founded in 2015, has been the dominant player in the AI ​​race since the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022. Since then, it has launched more sophisticated versions of ChatGPT, its text-to-image model DALL-E, and GPT 4o. The startup also announced a voice assistant, a text-to-video model called Sora, and its most sophisticated AI model, o1, which the startup says can reason logically.

But competitors – including some OpenAI investors like Microsoft – are catching up. On Wednesday, Meta announced that Meta AI is on track to become “the most used AI assistant in the world.”

OpenAI’s latest funding round – which would value the company at $150 billion – is now nearly complete and could include investors such as Apple and Nvidia, according to Bloomberg.

And Altman could make a hefty sum of money in a supposed restructuring of the company that would move the startup away from its current status as a nonprofit, according to Reuters and Bloomberg.