OpenAI engineer quits, citing burnout

OpenAI engineer Hieu Pham has recently announced his departure from the company, citing severe burnout and deteriorating mental health after years of intensive work in frontier AI development.

Pham, a member of technical staff at OpenAI, said in a post on X that he made "the difficult decision to leave OpenAI". The 34-year-old previously worked at xAI, where he was involved in development work on the Grok-3 model.

"I have helped create extremely intelligent entities that will meaningfully improve our lives. The work makes me proud," Pham wrote on X. "But the intensive work came with a price. I cannot believe I would say this one day, but I am burnt out. All the mental health deteriorating that I used to scoff at is real, miserable, scary, and dangerous."

Pham said he plans to take a break from frontier AI laboratories and return to his home country of Vietnam with his family, where he will seek treatment and explore new directions.

In February 2025, Pham described the Grok-3 project as the result of months of research and development, noting the work required intensive time commitments from staff. He wrote that he signed a contract with xAI in July 2024 and was assigned technical tasks before his official start date, including work related to managing power fluctuations in the Colossus supercomputer system.

"Working here and at xAI before was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I have met the best people," Pham added on his post. "Simply the best people."