OpenAI’s Chief Futurist resigns—personnel upheaval in the AGI era is more out of the blue, catching everyone off guard more than technological iterations.

CoinWorld reports that OpenAI Chief Futurist Joshua Achiam will leave the company on the 24th of this month and has publicly posted his farewell letter to the internal Slack channel on X. After joining as an intern in 2017, he worked on AI safety research for a long time. After disbanding the mission alignment team in February, he was reassigned as Chief Futurist, responsible for researching AGI and its impact on society, policy, and safety. The farewell letter states that the past nine years felt like a decade’s worth of a century’s change, and the future depends on the collective choices of all parties on AGI and superintelligence issues. No successor has been announced yet.