Top AI researcher Sebastien Bubeck leaves Microsoft for OpenAI

OpenAI has lost a lot of top leadership lately, but they’re gaining a big one: a top AI researcher from Microsoft.

In the wake of several high-profile exits, Microsoft’s Sebastien Bubeck is joining the OpenAI team, according to a report from The Information. Bubeck told his staff on Monday that he’s leaving for OpenAI. The new role at OpenAI is currently unknown, but the researcher is leaving Microsoft to “to further his work toward developing AGI,” said a Microsoft spokesperson to the outlet.

Within the past year, OpenAI has seen an exodus of top leadership, including co-founders Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman (on extended leave) and most recently, CTO Mira Murati, over reported clashes with the direction CEO Sam Altman is taking the company. Reports have surfaced of prioritizing commercialization over responsible AI development as OpenAI grows further away from a research lab and more into a typical for-profit tech company.

Bubeck is a VP of Microsoft GenAI and led a machine learning team in the development of Microsoft’s Phi models, which are low-cost, lightweight versions of OpenAI’s GPT models that are now used for Bing Chat and various Office 365 AI features. What Bubeck will do at OpenAI is uncertain, but the development of smaller, cheaper AI models is a growing area of focus for all AI companies, since they can perform many of the same everyday tasks as the the larger foundation models for a fraction of the cost.

Recently, OpenAI has taken to launching mini versions of their models, like GPT-4o mini and o1 mini, a lightweight version of its advanced reasoning model. So perhaps we’ll see more cost-effective models as OpenAI looks to turn a profit and recoup its funders $6.6 billion investment.