As Open AI employees celebrated the return of CEO Sam Altman with a five-alarm office party, OpenAI software engineer Steven Heidel was busy publicly rebuffing overtures from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
“Sorry Benioff but we’re too busy being so back,” Heidel posted on X above a screenshot of Benioff sliding into his DMs with offers to chat.
Heidel was one of more than 700 OpenAI employees who’s threatened exodus halted a would-be mutiny at one of Silicon Valley’s most important AI companies. For a second it looked as though the chaos at OpenAI would lead to a talent feeding frenzy among OpenAI rivals who for months have been warring over a limited supply of people who actually know how to build AI models and related tools. Now with the triumphant return of Altman, the once and future AI frontrunner looks stronger than ever.
So who are the top employees at OpenAI? While not a complete list, here are some of the company’s most talented staffers, including executive talent.
Business Insider also combed through OpenAI’s lesser known employees, their public accomplishments, and spoke to insiders and observers to reach a list of nearly 50 staffers who are central to the company’s plans going forward. BI has confirmed they currently work at the company and their contributions are notable.
Mira Murati: Murati leads the technology team at OpenAI. A mechanical engineer, she previously worked at Leap Motion and at Tesla working on the Model X. Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as a researcher, and was promoted to CTO in 2022. She grew up in Albania where she developed a passion for math and science, which led to a scholarship to study in Canada and eventually the US. Under her leadership at OpenAI, her teams released the blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT, as well image generator Dall-E, and several other AI products.
Brad Lightcap: Lightcap is OpenAI’s COO, and oversees business operations, strategic partnerships and operations. He also manages OpenAIs startup fund. Prior to joining OpenAI, Lightcap was a partner at Y Combinator and led finance and operations initiatives at Dropbox.
Jason Kwon: Kwon is the Chief Strategy Officer at OpenAI. Prior to joining OpenAI, he was the general counsel at Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, and the assistantant general counsel at Khosla Ventures.
Wojciech Zaremba: Zaremba is a co-founder at OpenAI. He was previously a scientist at Facebook AI Research and worked as a member of Google Brain under supervision of Prof. Geoffrey Hinton and Ilya Sutskever.
Alec Radford: Radford was hired in 2016 from a small AI company he founded in his dorm room. He is responsible for many of the key innovations that catapulted OpenAI to the front of the pack in the generative AI race. He even helped coin the term “generatively pretrained transformer” from which ChatGPT derives its name.
Peter Welinder: Welinder is the vice president of product and partnerships at OpenAI. He’s been at the company for seven years and started as a lead researcher. He was a founding member of the company’s robotics research effort, and quickly moved up the ranks to lead OpenAI’s product and commercialization efforts, which include GPT-4, ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, Codex and Github Copilot.
Anna Makanju: OpenAI’s head of global affairs who for the past year has been criss-crossing the globe alongside Sam Altman meeting with world leaders in an attempt to influence the future of AI regulation.
Andrej Karpathy: A research scientist and a founding team member of OpenAI. In 2016, he worked on deep learning for generative models, including image generators. He also worked with early recruitment efforts and company structuring. He left in 2017 for Tesla, where he worked as the Senior Director of AI, leading the computer vision team for Tesla’s Autopilot. He returned to OpenAI in 2023.
Ilya Sutskever: OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, Sutskever’s early research helped make the company’s AI models possible.
Michael Petrov: An OpenAI competitor called Petrov “probably the best single engineer after Greg [Brockman]”
Miles Brundage: Brundage joined OpenAI in 2018 after serving at the U.S. Department of Energy with a focus on climate change. He also had a stint at Oxford University where he was an AI policy research fellow.
John Schulman OpenAI co-founder, leading the company’s reinforcement learning team
Srinivas Narayanan: Vice President of Applied AI leading prodcuts efforts including ChaptGPT and APIs
Scott Grey: One former OpenAI employee said of Grey that he’s “top 30 in the world for GPU kernels”
Bob McGrew: Vice President of Research
Che Chang: OpenAI’s General Counsel
Lillian Weng: Head of Safety Systems
Mark Chen: Head of Frontiers Research
Barret Zoph: Co-leads OpenAI’s post-training team
Peter Deng: VP of Consumer Product at OpenAI
Steven Heidel
Jong Wook Kim: technical staff, worked CLIP and Whisper.
Tao Xu: technical staff, worked on GPT4 and Whisper
Christine McLeavey: technical staff, with contributions to music-related products
Christina Kim: technical staff
Christopher Hesse: technical staff
Heewoo Jun: technical staff, research
Alex Nichol: technical staff, research
William Fedus: technical staff, research
Ilge Akkaya: technical staff, research
Vineet Kosaraju: technical staff, research
Henrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto: technical staff
Aditya Ramesh: technical staff, developed DALL-E and DALL-E 2
Prafulla Dhariwal: research scientist
Hunter Lightman: technical staff
Harrison Edwards: research scientist
Yura Burda: machine language researcher
Tyna Eloundou: technical staff, research
Pamela Mishkin: researcher
Casey Chu: researcher
David Dohan: technical staff, research
Aidan Clark: researcher
Raul Puri: research scientist
Leo Gao: technical staff, research
Yang Song: technical staff, research
Giambattista Parascandolo
Todor Markov: Machine learning researcher
Nick Ryder: technical staff
Jakub Pachocki: Director of Research
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