Following the major overhaul of OpenAI's executive team, Elon Musk, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Tesla, has seen a key developer at X (formerly Twitter) leave the company.
According to IT media outlet The Verge on the 25th, Haofei Wang, the engineering director at X, has reportedly left the company suddenly. Wang joined Twitter in 2021 and has played a key decision-making role since joining X in July 2023. The Verge reported that Wang recently took over as the head of the engineering and institutional sector.
While Wang's official reason for leaving is not known, it is speculated to be related to X recently strengthening its engineering institutional sector workforce in connection with collaboration with xAI. According to The Verge, Mike Dalton and Uday Ludhara, who were leading technology at U.S. fintech platform Robinhood, joined X in January, and both are reported to be responsible for xAI-related tasks. xAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by CEO Musk. The AI model Grok from xAI has been integrated and used on the X platform.
Changes are also underway at the top of OpenAI. Since last year, core talents at OpenAI have chosen to leave, opposing the company's incorporation as a for-profit entity. Co-founders Andrej Karpaty, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman, along with Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mira Murati, have left, creating a vacancy.
In response, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, noted the day before (local time) that there will be a complete reorganization of the executive structure. Altman stated that Chief Operating Officer (COO) Brad Lightcap will lead global expansion and corporate partnerships. Lightcap worked with Altman at the venture capital firm Y Combinator and joined OpenAI in 2018.
OpenAI announced that it will promote Mark Chen, the former senior vice president of the research institutional sector, to chief research officer (CRO) and assign him the task of integrating research and product development.
Reuters analyzed that Altman's focus on technology is a strategy to strengthen OpenAI's dominance in the rapidly growing AI industry. Bloomberg reported that "Altman's drive aims to push cutting-edge AI research that can support powerful new products for consumers and corporations."