Workers are leaving Big Tech for OpenAI. These are spread across the growing startup ecosystem. Rinse and repeat.
Since launching ChatGPT, the Sam Altman-led company has quickly become a magnet for AI talent. The company poached hundreds of researchers and engineers from competitors including Google, Meta and Apple, according to data reviewed by Business Insider. After working for a while, many of these employees end up founding or joining their own rival startups.
Since chatbots became popular in 2023, the company has nearly quadrupled in size, growing from a small research lab with about 1,000 employees to a technology company with more than 4,000 employees.
To understand how OpenAI is faring in the race for AI talent, Business Insider analyzed research from workforce intelligence provider Live Data Technologies. The company used LinkedIn to track the comings and goings of approximately 1,300 employees from January 2023 to March 2026.
Live Data Technologies analyzed publicly available professional profile data for OpenAI employees who had available information about their previous employers. The roles analyzed ranged from engineering and research to product, human resources, and recruitment.
Representatives from OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.
The company’s hiring pipeline is highly concentrated.
OpenAI was originally founded by Altman and Elon Musk in 2015 to compete with Google’s DeepMind AI Lab.
Google is currently OpenAI’s largest source of talent, accounting for about a quarter of its hires, data shows.
Almost half of OpenAI adopters in the past three years have come from Google, Meta, Apple, or Microsoft.
Apple’s Jony Ive joined OpenAI last summer to work on developing new AI devices. The project includes about 300 employees, many of them from Apple, The Information reported earlier this year.
The company has also made several high-profile hires over the past year, including Slack CEO Denise Dresser, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.
Since 2023, OpenAI has added about four times as many engineers as it lost, highlighting the company’s rapid expansion as AI competition intensifies.
The competition for AI talent is among the fiercest in Silicon Valley. Big Tech companies are aggressively competing for the relatively small number of researchers who can build advanced AI systems.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly played a hands-on role in recruiting talented AI employees, while Meta and other companies reportedly offer huge compensation packages, sometimes worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in stock.
OpenAI is known for its high compensation package. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that employees received an average of $1.5 million in stock compensation. According to public salary data for H-1B visa applications, salaries for research scientists at AI ventures range from $245,000 to $685,000, while salaries for engineering positions are listed between $165,000 and $290,000.
Where will employees go after OpenAI tells a different story?
According to the data, departures are fragmented and spread across more than 150 different companies, including competitors such as Meta, Anthropic and emerging labs such as Thinking Machines Lab. According to the data, the majority of OpenAI employees left for small startups, venture capital firms, or academic institutions.
This data suggests that OpenAI is becoming the center of the AI talent network, poaching researchers from Big Tech and sending graduates across the startup and VC ecosystems.
According to our data, only a handful of companies have hosted 15 or more OpenAI graduates in the past three years: Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Thinking Machines Lab.
Perhaps the best known example is anthropology. It was founded by former OpenAI researchers, including brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei. Max Schwarzer, vice president of research, left OpenAI to join Anthropic earlier this month.
Meanwhile, several OpenAI employees who left the company in February to help found Thinking Machine Labs returned to OpenAI earlier this year, including Barrett Zoff.
According to our data, common roles at OpenAI include engineering and research. The average tenure for U.S.-based OpenAI employees is approximately 16 months.
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