Liam Fedus to Lead Post-Training at OpenAI as Luke Metz Departs

Liam Fedus to Lead Post-Training at OpenAI as Luke Metz Departs

William "Liam" Fedus, a key figure in developing OpenAI's reasoning models, has been promoted to lead the post-training team. This news comes as senior researcher Luke Metz announced that he his departing after a two-year tenure.

Fedus steps into a role previously held by Barret Zoph, who left OpenAI recently alongside CTO Mira Murati and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew. He has a deep background in machine learning research, previously worked at Google Brain before joining OpenAI, and has a Ph.D. from Université de Montréal.

Two More Executives Depart OpenAI
Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Head of Post-Training Barret Zoph are also leaving the AI powerhouse.

The post-training team he now heads, plays a crucial role in preparing and optimizing AI models for public release. It focuses on enhancing model robustness, reliability, and safety, ensuring that OpenAI’s offerings meet high standards before reaching end users.

These changes also come as OpenAI expands globally, announcing new offices in New York, Seattle, Paris, Brussels, and Singapore. The company aims to broaden its talent pool and strengthen its international presence as it pursues artificial general intelligence.

OpenAI Expands Global Footprint with New Offices in Five Cities
As the company grows, it’s not just about geographic presence but also about positioning itself to work more closely with global partners, institutions, and communities.

Still, questions continue to linger about team morale and leadership at OpenAI. While it’s natural for high-profile employees to explore new opportunities, the concentration of departures over the last year—including other leaders such as Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman—suggests there may be a bigger underlying issue at the company.

However, despite the turnover, the company continues to innovate and forge ahead with impressive product releases. At the recent DevDay 2024, OpenAI unveiled key updates aimed at developers, including the Realtime API for speech-to-speech applications, enhanced vision fine-tuning capabilities, prompt caching, and a new model distillation process. Last week, OpenAI also introduced Canvas, a new interface for ChatGPT that enables more complex collaborations between users and AI.

Chris McKay is the founder and chief editor of Maginative. His thought leadership in AI literacy and strategic AI adoption has been recognized by top academic institutions, media, and global brands.

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