Meet the OpenAI employees who are so valuable they stopped a corporate coup in its tracks

• More than 700 OpenAI employees threatened to quit after the board fired CEO Sam Altman last Friday.
• The mass exodus halted a would-be mutiny and helped lead to Altman’s reinstatement.
• Business Insider compiled a list of some of the most important employees at OpenAI, according to insiders and observers.

While Open AI employees celebrated CEO Sam Altman’s return with a five-alarm office party, OpenAI software engineer Steven Heidel was busy publicly rejecting overtures from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

“Sorry Benioff, but we’re too busy being so back,” Heidel wrote on X, above a screenshot of Benioff sliding into his DMs with chat offers.

Heidel was one of over 700 OpenAI employees whose threatened exodus put an end to a mutiny at one of Silicon Valley’s most important AI firms. For a brief moment, it appeared that the chaos at OpenAI would spark a talent feeding frenzy among OpenAI rivals, who have been fighting for months over a limited supply of people who actually know how to build AI models and related tools. With Altman’s triumphant return, the once and future AI frontrunner appears to be stronger than ever.

So, who are the top OpenAI employees? While this is not an exhaustive list, it does include some of the company’s most talented employees, including executive talent.

Business Insider also combed through OpenAI’s lesser-known employees, their public accomplishments, and spoke with insiders and observers to compile a list of nearly 50 employees who are central to the company’s future plans. BI has confirmed that they are still employed by the company and that their contributions are significant.

Mira Murati: Murati leads OpenAI’s technology team. She is a mechanical engineer who previously worked at Leap Motion and Tesla on the Model X. Murati joined OpenAI as a researcher in 2018 and was promoted to CTO in 2022. She grew up in Albania, where she developed a love of math and science, which led to a scholarship to study in Canada and, later, the United States. Her teams at OpenAI released the blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT, as well as image generator Dall-E and several other AI products, under her leadership.

Brad Lightcap: As COO of OpenAI, Lightcap is in charge of business operations, strategic partnerships, and operations. He is also in charge of OpenAI’s startup fund. Lightcap was a Y Combinator partner and led finance and operations initiatives at Dropbox prior to joining OpenAI.

Jason Kwon is OpenAI’s Chief Strategy Officer. He was the general counsel at Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund and the assistantant general counsel at Khosla Ventures before joining OpenAI.

Wojciech Zaremba: Zaremba is an OpenAI co-founder. He previously worked as a scientist at Facebook AI Research and as a member of Google Brain under Prof. Geoffrey Hinton and Ilya Sutskever’s supervision.

Alec Radford was hired in 2016 from a small AI company he started in his dorm room. He is the driving force behind many of the key innovations that propelled OpenAI to the forefront of the generative AI race. He even contributed to the coining of the term “generatively pretrained transformer,” from which ChatGPT gets its name.

Welinder, Peter: Welinder is OpenAI’s vice president of product and partnerships. He has been with the company for seven years, beginning as a lead researcher. He was a founding member of the company’s robotics research team and quickly rose through the ranks to lead OpenAI’s product and commercialization efforts, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, Codex, and Github Copilot.

Anna Makanju: OpenAI’s head of global affairs, who has been crisscrossing the globe with Sam Altman for the past year meeting with world leaders in an attempt to influence the future of AI regulation.

Andrej Karpathy is a research scientist and an OpenAI founding team member. He worked on deep learning for generative models, including image generators, in 2016. He also assisted with early recruitment and company structure. He left in 2017 to join Tesla as Senior Director of AI, where he led the computer vision team for Tesla’s Autopilot. In 2023, he returned to OpenAI.

Ilya Sutskever: As co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, Sutskever’s early research contributed to the company’s AI models.

Michael Petrov: According to one OpenAI competitor, Petrov is “probably the best single engineer after Greg [Brockman].”

Miles Brundage: Brundage joined OpenAI in 2018 after working at the US Department of Energy as a climate change specialist. He also worked as an AI policy research fellow at Oxford University.

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is in charge of the company’s reinforcement learning team.

Srinivas Narayanan: Vice President of Applied AI in charge of product development, including ChaptGPT and APIs.

Grey, Scott: Grey is said to be “top 30 in the world for GPU kernels” by one former OpenAI employee.

Vice President of Research, Bob McGrew

Che Chang is the General Counsel of OpenAI.

Lillian Weng is the Director of Safety Systems.

Mark Chen is the Director of Frontiers Research.

Barret Zoph is a member of OpenAI’s post-training team.

Peter Deng is the Vice President of Consumer Product at OpenAI.

Mr. Jan Leike

Morikawa, Evan

Heidel, Steven

Jong Wook Kim: technical staff member who worked on CLIP and Whisper.

Tao Xu: technical personnel who worked on GPT4 and Whisper

Christine McLeavey is a technical staff member who has contributed to music-related products.

Christina Kim is a member of the technical staff.

Christopher Hesse is a member of the technical staff.

Heewoo Jun: technical personnel and research

Alex Nichol: research and technical staff

William Fedus: technical and research staff

Ilge Akkaya: technical personnel and research

Vineet Kosaraju: technical personnel and research

Henrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto is a member of the technical staff.

Aditya Ramesh: technical staff member who created DALL-E and DALL-E 2.

Prafulla Dhariwal is a researcher.

Hunter Lightman is a member of the technical staff.

Harrison Edwards is a researcher.

Yura Burda is a machine learning researcher.

Tyna Eloundou: research and technical staff

Pamela Mishkin works as a researcher.

Casey Chu is a researcher.

David Dohan: research and technical staff

Aidan Clark is a researcher.

Raul Puri is a researcher.

Leo Gao: technical personnel, research

Yang Song: technical personnel and research

Parascandolo, Giambattista

Todor Markov is a researcher in machine learning.

Nick Ryder is a member of the technical staff.

Jakub Pachocki: Research Director