Nilay Patel

People are leaving OpenAI for Anthropic or vice versa or going to some other lab or quitting to go live in the woods basically every week right now.

Usually it's someone high profile leaving the safety team or some other division of a big AI lab and then joining another one a few days later.

Sometimes they quit only to announce they've been poached a couple weeks later.

Sometimes they quit and say we're all going to die and that they're going to retire to Europe to write poetry, which we just saw with an Anthropic researcher who left the company this month saying, quote, the world is in peril.

That's just a little worrisome.

You follow this industry every day.

How would you characterize what's happening in the AI industry right now, just in terms of people getting new jobs and quitting their old jobs?

Can I ask a really rude question?

How much does any single AI researcher make or break any single AI company at this point?

When you say that people are leaving because of their personal mission,

There's a part of me that just buys it, right?

You've made so much money that someone offering you even more money will have maybe no impact on your life.

But you think the leader of one company has the wrong values, so you're going to want to go work for another company that has the right values.

Or you think one company is closer to AGI and you want to be nearer to that idea.

Yeah.

How often does that come up publicly where the people leaving jobs or switching between these companies are actually saying the place I was was misaligned with my personal mission and I'm going to another place that's more closely aligned?

Is this just like writing out why I'm leaving New York, I say?

Like you're starting a sub stack and you've got to trash the New York Times on your way out the door to get attention to your sub stack.

Is it the same vibe?

Just last week, OpenAI snapped up OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger.