William (Liam) Fedus, OpenAI’s vice president of research for post-training, has announced his departure to launch a new AI-driven material science venture with which OpenAI is reportedly partnering with.
The AI materials science field is still in its early stages, and Fedus’ company will be competing with major players like Google DeepMind and Microsoft in this space. In January, Microsoft launched two AI tools for discovering materials: MatterGen and MatterSim. MatterGen is an AI-driven model that can generate new materials with specific desired properties while MatterSim is a deep-learning model that simulates materials under realistic conditions, predicting energies, atomic forces, and stresses.
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Fedus wrote on X, “I’ve gotten really excited about AI for science. My undergrad was in physics and I’m keen to apply this technology there. Because AI for science is one of the most strategically important areas to OpenAI and achieving ASI, OpenAI is planning to invest in and partner with my new company.”
Mixed perceptions from previous employee exits
Earlier in February, Mira Murati, former CTO at OpenAI also resigned to pursue her startup Thinking Machines Lab. Others who resigned include Ilya Sutskever, former co-founder and chief scientist, Daniel Kokotajlo and Jan Leike.
However, not all these resignations have contributed to a positive market perception of the AI giant.
Earlier in 2024, Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI’s governance division and one of the employee group’s organizers said “OpenAI is really excited about building AGI, and they are recklessly racing to be the first there.”
The group published an open letter in 2024 calling for leading AI companies, including OpenAI, to establish greater transparency and more protections for whistle-blowers. Other members include William Saunders, a research engineer who left OpenAI in February, and three other former OpenAI employees: Carroll Wainwright, Jacob Hilton and Daniel Ziegler.
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Wall street is still positive
Despite these exits raising ethical concerns on AI safety, and a probable internal shift in leadership structures due to the more recent exit of Fedus, investor confidence continues to remain high. Japanese SoftBank is about to invest up to $40 billion in the maker of the chatbot ChatGPT, according to latest reports. The new funding would mean SoftBank surpasses Microsoft as the artificial intelligence startup’s top backer. OpenAI was last valued at $157 billion by private investors in October.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk and OpenAI are set to battle legally. The suit aims to stop OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company.