In what appears to be an unprecedented and welcome move, OpenAI has asked all its employees to take a week off to focus on their well-being. This mandatory vacation should be hailed as it allows burned-out employees to relax and recharge, but the reason behind this week-long break reveals the dark underside of the cut-throat AI industry.
According to Wired, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has given his staff an entire week, calling it a much-needed break for researchers who have toiled to turn the company’s vision of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the next era of generative AI, into reality. But the actual reality is a far cry, highlighting the company’s employee crisis.
More than a dozen OpenAI employees recently quit, citing extreme pressure and demands to work for at least 80 hours a week. One of the employees, Cheng Lu, who is still at OpenAI, posted on X, saying, “Such a huge loss to OpenAI and I feel really disappointed that the leadership didn’t keep them.” The now-deleted post quickly went viral, revealing the secret of how AI companies are pushing humans at the cost of innovation.
Building god-like superintelligence is not a nine-to-five job, so these employees, mostly top researchers, were convinced that their sacrifice would contribute to the greater good, and even the company made them believe so. But when Meta began poaching OpenAI’s top talent, luring employees through perks, including fewer working hours and less burden, the Altman-led company sprang into action.
The week-long break is more like damage control for the company, which has struggled to retain its employees. But, at the same time, it allows OpenAI to ward off Meta’s further attempts at poaching. It also reveals a deep-seated problem with AI development in 2025, which demands dedication to the point of burnout. The researchers who left OpenAI were its top employees, who lost their willpower to dedicate their work to exhaustion and mental breakdown. In chasing AGI, OpenAI may be losing the very intelligence it can’t afford to lose: its people.
