Overview
- Hieu Pham announced on X that he is leaving OpenAI, calling the decision difficult and saying he is burnt out.
- He described severe mental-health deterioration as real, scary, and dangerous, while noting pride in helping build extremely intelligent systems.
- Pham said he will step away from frontier AI labs, take his family to Vietnam, try something new, and search for a cure for his condition.
- Earlier this month he wrote that he finally feels the existential threat posed by AI, arguing disruption is a matter of when, not if.
- Pham previously worked at xAI, Google Brain/DeepMind, and Augment Code, and reports say he spent about seven months at OpenAI; he also rebutted a claim he was on an H‑1B visa, stating he held O‑1 then EB‑1A.