The war for artificial intelligence is getting personal.
In recent days, after multiple OpenAI researchers left the company for Meta, one remaining employee publicly broke down. “Not too many people outside the company know how talented and hardcore they are,” Cheng Lu, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, posted on X on June 29, commenting on a post announcing that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, or “Zuck,” had poached four elite Chinese researchers.
He continued: “Such a huge loss to OpenAI and I feel really disappointed that the leadership didn’t keep them.”
The post, which was later deleted, quickly went viral. It revealed something Silicon Valley prefers to keep hidden: the emotional and psychological cost of building the so-called future of intelligence.
Even OpenAI employees confirm the extent of the loss of reserachers to Meta. pic.twitter.com/bsZe21FRpu
— Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) June 29, 2025
This raw display of employee grief comes as WIRED reports that OpenAI is shutting down for the entire week, forcing its staff to rest and recharge after a relentless push toward creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Internally, it’s being framed as a much-needed break. But for a company locked in a brutal talent war, this mandatory vacation feels less like a wellness initiative and more like a panic button.
The narrative of a looming burnout crisis has been quietly building for months. The mission to build a god-like intelligence is not a standard nine to five job. Reports from within the industry describe grueling, 80-hour workweeks as the baseline for researchers at top AI labs. This work has become a crusade, demanding total devotion from its acolytes. For years, the promise of achieving AGI, a technology that could solve all of humanity’s problems, was enough to fuel this sacrifice. The mission itself was the compensation.
But now, that faith is being tested. The catalyst for this apparent crisis is Meta. While OpenAI engineers are tweeting like they’ve lost loved ones, Zuckerberg is reportedly assembling a new elite AI team, stocked with former OpenAI and Google DeepMind talent. It’s a quiet, methodical power play that may eventually tilt the AI landscape in his favor, especially if OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, keeps bleeding expertise.
This is what the “AI revolution” actually looks like in 2025. Not just lines of code and chatbot demos, but emotional breakdowns, brain drain, and billionaires treating research labs like fantasy football teams.
OpenAI’s burnout problem isn’t new, but it is becoming harder to hide. The company has weathered multiple executive departures over the past two years, including the dramatic and brief firing of CEO Sam Altman, a crisis that exposed persistent internal tensions over safety, speed, and power.
Now, with top researchers defecting and others visibly shaken, the company’s decision to pause for a wellness week feels less like a perk and more like damage control. Is OpenAI trying to fix a deep-seated culture problem with a one-week band-aid? By forcing everyone to log off simultaneously, they may be attempting to short circuit the poaching pipeline, preventing recruiters from picking off exhausted and isolated employees one by one. It’s an attempt to stanch the bleeding.
The situation exposes the fundamental tension at the heart of the AGI pursuit. Building God is an expensive and exhausting business. For the first time, we are seeing the very real human cost of this technological arms race. The question for OpenAI is whether a week off is enough to convince its brilliant, burnt-out employees that the mission is still worth more than the money. For the rest of us, it’s a sign that even at the world’s most ambitious company, the cult of world-changing technology is beginning to show its cracks.
For all the headlines about AI taking over the world, what we’re seeing at OpenAI is profoundly human. Exhaustion. Grief. Uncertainty. Even the best engineers in the most powerful labs are reaching their limits. And the companies pushing hardest to “change everything” are, ironically, the ones most visibly fraying under the weight of their own hype.
For AI skeptics, this moment is revealing. Not because it proves AI isn’t important, but because it shows how fragile the infrastructure truly is. Not the servers or the models, but the people. The human brains behind the artificial ones.
If OpenAI is the future, then the future is crying on its timeline and taking a mandatory mental health week. And if Meta wins the race, it may be because it remained just cold and ruthless enough to avoid all that.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
