departure

Shen Zheng announced his departure from xAI, where he worked on improving Grok's search and DeepResearch capabilities.

OpenAI's head of safety systems, Johannes Heidecke, is leaving the company amid a reorganization that integrates safety and research teams. The departure follows the launch of GPT-5.6 and other safety leader exits.

Fuji Kanaeda announces departure from Nvidia after a year, highlighting contributions to synthetic data generation (NeMo Data Designer) and Nemotron LLM builds, praising the team's work on open-source AI.

Sam Altman expresses sadness over Fidji Simo's departure from OpenAI due to a chronic illness exacerbation, wishing her a speedy recovery.

An OpenAI employee announces leaving full-time role to become part-time advisor due to a chronic illness, emphasizing the importance of health and AI's potential to solve real-world problems like disease.

Jason Chiam announces his departure from OpenAI after nine years, expressing gratitude and optimism about the future of AGI.

QClaw product director Zhang Shuyu (1999-born liberal arts graduate) resigned. Exaggerated rumors about her are hard to verify; the tweet satirizes the style of some product managers.

Jia Yangqing, former Facebook AI Architecture Director and LeptonAI founder, left NVIDIA one year after NVIDIA acquired his startup team. According to SemiAnalysis, reasons include DGX Lepton's performance not meeting expectations and disagreements with Jensen Huang over open-source commitments.

Nico Albanese announced his departure from Vercel after two years working on the AI SDK, expressing gratitude and hinting at future plans.

A researcher announces departure from Anthropic, citing a more important mission akin to the Manhattan Project.

A developer gave up Google DeepMind acquisition equity and left voluntarily. He joined Codeium two years ago, developed the Windsurf product and trained the programming model SWE-1. The company was then acquired by DeepMind for $240 million, but he chose to resign.

A researcher announces their departure from Meta FAIR after two years working on LLM reasoning, reflecting on their experience leading a team.