OpenAI employees are coming out in support of their CEO, saying that, yes, he’s actually very receptive to critical feedback.
Eric Mitchell, who co-leads OpenAI’s Post-training Frontiers team, wrote that there were multiple times when he “directly disagreed with, corrected, or expressed frustration with leadership to Sam.”
“Sam always responded with curiosity, open-mindedness, and even deference when I’ve brought disagreement/complaint/correction to him,” Mitchell wrote.
One such disagreement occurred during Mitchell’s first six months at the company, he wrote.
Mitchell and other staffers responded to a since-deleted post by Nick Huber, an AI product leader. According to screenshots of the post, Huber described an interview with OpenAI where an interviewer asked him to use data to test a belief purportedly held by Altman.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider or confirm whether Huber had been interviewed by the company. Huber did not respond to a request for comment.
In his post, Mitchell wrote that any claims that the company had a “culture where people are retaliated against for honest criticism of leadership” were inaccurate.
In Mitchell’s comments, two former staffers expressed praised Altman. Both worked on Sora, the AI video product OpenAI announced it would shut down in March.
“Can confirm, Sam is super receptive,” wrote Gabriel Petersson, a former researcher at OpenAI and Midjourney who has since founded his own company.
Will DePue left OpenAI in April. He wrote that the company was “exceptionally receptive to internal disagreement and critique, for better or worse.”
OpenAI researcher Brandon McKinzie wrote on X that he’s given any critical feedback he’s had to Altman and other company leaders.
“Not only do they listen to critical feedback, they take it very seriously and take action on it,” McKinzie said. “It is one of OpenAI’s greatest strengths.”
A 2021 study found that allowing workers to share criticism openly, and even sharing those criticisms among the workplace, allows employees to feel a greater sense of “psychological safety.”
Feeling psychologically safe — or willing to take risks without fear of embarrassment or punishment — is important for good work. Google listed it as the most important trait of an effective team in 2015.
Altman’s leadership style has been much discussed since his brief ousting and return as CEO in 2023. At the time, OpenAI’s board said that he was “not consistently candid in his communications.” Altman said during a recent court battle with Elon Musk that, “I believe I am an honest and trustworthy business person.”
The series of events, which staffers have referred to as “the Blip,” is the focus of a coming movie directed by Luca Guadagnino, which was recently picked up by Neon after Amazon walked away from the project after deepening ties with OpenAI.
Some of the OpenAI staffers who publicly posted about their experience at the company praised the “hard conversations” they said happen regularly.
Victor Nunez, a staffer who works on OpenAI’s Codex coding tool, wrote that the “amount of memes and hard conversations on a daily basis is astounding,” but that everyone at the company “really leans into it.”
For all the AI and automation work they do, Nunez wrote that the company’s culture was “as human as it gets.”
