Leadership Exodus Hits AI Labs Amid Record-Breaking Exit Packages

OpenAI's former chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, has left the company to start something new, following a $7 billion tender offer that allowed employees to sell their shares.

This is the latest in a series of leadership shake-ups at OpenAI. Six days earlier, four top engineers from Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) departed to found Discovery Loop, a start-up aimed at automating scientific research.

The engineers who left include Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Their departure comes as Demis Hassabis stepped back from running Google DeepMind, where he was replaced by Koray Kavukcuoglu.