OpenAI’s VP of Research and Security resigns, feels ready to ‘reset’

Lilian Weng, Vice President of Research and Security at OpenAI, has decided to leave the company and ‘explore something new’.

Weng launched her career at OpenAI back in 2017, when she started out as a scientist at the robotics division. She was tasked to develop a robot hand that was able to solve a Rubik’s cube. It took her and her team two years, but eventually they succeeded.

After the GPT-4 launch in April 2023, Weng was asked to take on a new challenge: to shape and lead OpenAI’s security department. The team currently has 80 employees and is responsible for the full safety stack of OpenAI’s products.

“Together, we’ve been the cornerstone of every launch: from GPT-4 and its visual and turbo variants, to the GPT Store, voice capabilities and 01. Our work in training these models to be both powerful and responsible has set new industry standards,” Weng says on X, calling her job “one of the most difficult, stressful and exciting things” she has ever done.

Weng goes on summing up the most memorable achievements she and her team accomplished over the last seven years. “Looking at what we have achieved, I’m so proud of everyone on the Safety Systems team and I have extremely high confidence that the team will continue thriving,” she says.

Weng concludes her post by expressing she’s ready “to reset and explore something new”. What her next endeavor is going to be, remains unclear. Friday November 15 will be her last day at the office.

Weng isn’t the first senior employee to announce her resignation at OpenAI. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former Chief Scientist at OpenAI, decided to leave the company in June this year and to set up his own AI shop called Safe Superintelligence Inc.

John Schulman, one of the company’s co-founders, left OpenAI in August to join competitor Anthropic. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO and interim CEO, stepped down in September. Chief research officer Bob McGrew and Vice President Post-Training Barret Zoph announced their resignations around the same time.