AI insiders are loud quitting

Top News

• OpenAI researcher exits: Zoë Hitzig, a researcher who worked at OpenAI for two years and helped to guide internal safety policies “before standards were set in stone,” has exited the company, and wrote a New York Times op-ed outlining the reasoning behind her decision. Though Hitzig acknowledges the overall need for advertising to help offset the massive costs of building frontier AI models, she takes issue with the way ChatGPT ads are taking shape. Specifically, Hitzig is worried about OpenAI building an ad network on top of the vast trove of sensitive private information users have spent the last few years sharing with their favorite chatbot. She compares ad-based OpenAI with Facebook, which slowly eroded promises about security and privacy — while increasing the app’s addictiveness — to goose engagement and thus sell more ads.

• Zhipu unveils GLM-5: The Chinese AI concern dropped its latest open-source model ahead of the country’s Lunar New Year festival. Reuters reports that GLM-5 upgrades the model’s coding abilities, and also its capacity for performing long-running complex tasks. Based strictly on the benchmarks, GLM-5 approaches Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in terms of coding and bests Google’s Gemini 3 Pro in some categories. Notably, GLM-5 was developed and trained using domestically-produced Chinese chips, such as Huawei’s Ascend, rather than imported chips from US suppliers like Nvidia, part of a large-scale process by Chinese firms to become regionally self-reliant.

• Inertia raises $450M for freaking laserbeams: The fusion company — building on technology developed by California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) — is building an extraordinarily powerful laser, which it hopes to one day use as the basis for a grid-scale power plant. (That’s a plant that produces and delivers electricity directly to a regional or national grid at scale, for the curious.) The co-founders include some of the scientists behind the NIF project (Annie Kritcher and Mike Dunne) and Twilio CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson. They've raised a $450 million Series A, and hope to have construction started on their first plant by 2030.

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We discussed an OpenAI researcher’s very vocal departure above, but this is not an isolated incident. Also this week, we saw Anthropic safety researcher Mrinak Sharma exit the company, after publishing a study about “disempowerment patterns.” These are scenarios in which chatting with Claude led users to form “distorted perceptions of reality or act in ways misaligned with their values.”

In an open letter published to X, Sharma expressed concern that Anthropic staffers are facing pressure to break with the company’s stated values and principles in order to push out new products and drive more engagement. He adds: “I want to explore the questions that feel truly essential to me," which he can apparently accomplish only by exiting the Claude maker.

Elon Musk’s xAI also lost some crucial staffers this week. Just a day after the departure of co-founder Tony Wu, researcher Jimmy Ba also announced plans to leave the Grok company. But Ba didn’t express concerns about AI safety; he’s chiefly worried about missing out on the Age of AI Acceleration, explaining “we are heading to an age of 100x productivity with the right tools,” and predicting that “rescursive self-improvement” is coming to AI models within the next year.

Still, that’s three big AI exits, which officially makes it a TREND. Jason posted to X that he’s surprised with the rate at which AI researchers are departing their posts, and noting that it appears to be accelerating.

Undaunted (he’s a tough guy to daunt), Musk hosted a forum for remaining xAI employees, laying out his vision for the company’s future. The new goal: a factory on the moon that fashions AI satellites, armed with a catapult for launching them into orbit. It’s an extraordinarily ambitious scheme that absolutely helps to explain why xAI simply had to unite with SpaceX, and why fundraising through a record-setting IPO later this year will be so clutch. – Lon

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