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Greetings! Talk about staying above the fray. Even as the latest rash of senior executive departures from OpenAI sparks a fresh round of questions about the company's management, CEO Sam Altman was in Turin, Italy, appearing at an event to do what he does best: talk about the future. In an onstage interview, Altman did address the latest departures at OpenAI—according to a transcript provided by OpenAI—but only to pooh-pooh the idea that Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and others quit because of a looming restructuring of OpenAI into a for-profit company. As Altman pointed out, OpenAI has been discussing that for almost a year. (The Information first reported that the idea was under consideration in May.) OK, fair point, but Altman is denying something no one suggested—a clever tactic if your aim is to obfuscate. Yes, news outlets pointed out the defections were occurring as the restructuring was discussed. That's not the same as reporting those two things were connected. Reporters typically fill information vacuums by throwing in a mention of whatever else they know is going on, even if there's not necessarily a connection. It helps provide context. For even more context on the departures, see our story today. Altman went on to assert that Murati and others left because they were "ready for new chapters of their lives," building on Murati's own statement on X that she was leaving "to create the time and space to do my own exploration." In other words: Move along, there's nothing to see here. It is true that OpenAI constantly has so much going on that finding the right time to leave would be difficult. But it can't be a coincidence that in the past few months, OpenAI has lost its chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, as well as co-founder John Schulman (whose successor, Barret Zoph, also quit this week), researcher Andrej Karpathy, research chief Bob McGrew and Jan Leike, who ran OpenAI's superalignment AI safety team with Sutskever. That's in addition to Murati. Another co-founder, President Greg Brockman, has taken a sabbatical. A more believable explanation for this steady spate of defections, as we indicated in our story today, is that the typical pressures of working at a startup—magnified by the extraordinary technologies OpenAI is developing—simply wore people down. Even OpenAI's ChatGPT suspects that's the case. When I asked the chatbot why so many people had left OpenAI, it suggested "the intense pressures of working in a fast-paced environment" could be a factor. But it also noted that "the rapid evolution of AI technology can create competitive opportunities elsewhere, leading some employees to seek new challenges or align with different organizational values." That makes a lot of sense. (Sutskever, for instance, has started his own company, while Schulman has gone to rival Anthropic.) ChatGPT, it seems, is more on the money than Altman himself. He should be proud! The Neeva folks are expanding their control of Snowflake. The data analytics firm's CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, today promoted his Neeva co-founder, Vivek Raghunathan, to oversee the company's engineers. The two had joined the company when Snowflake bought Neeva, a search startup, in the middle of last year. Within eight months of the acquisition, Ramaswamy was elevated to CEO, succeeding Frank Slootman. Snowflake was grappling with the transition to artificial intelligence at the time, a transition that isn't getting easier. Indeed, Snowflake stock has been trading below its $120 per share IPO price for the past month, the longest period it has done so since its blockbuster 2020 IPO. The question now is whether Ramaswamy and Raghunathan will be more successful at Snowflake than they were in making Neeva a viable threat to Google. Stay tuned! • Fintech banking startup Chime has hired Morgan Stanley to lead its planned IPO next year, Bloomberg reported. • Trading brokerage Robinhood and digital banking app Revolut are considering launching stablecoins, Bloomberg reported, moves that could take market share from Tether and other top stablecoin issuers. The Information Weekend covers what happens when Silicon Valley logs off—the trends and people shaping culture, technology and everything in between. Subscribe for free today. | 
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