In recent days, after several OpenAI researchers left the company for Meta, one remaining employee publicly broke down. “Not many people outside of the company know how talented and passionate they are,” Cheng Lu, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, wrote on June 29, commenting on reports that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, or “Zuck,” had poached four elite Chinese researchers.
He continued: “This is a huge loss for OpenAI, and I’m very disappointed that the leadership didn’t keep them.”
The post, which was later deleted, quickly went viral. It revealed what Silicon Valley prefers to hide: the emotional and psychological cost of building the so-called future of intelligence.
This frank display of employee grief comes after WIRED reported that OpenAI is closing for an entire week, forcing its employees to rest and recharge after a relentless push to create artificial general intelligence (AGI). Internally, this is being presented as a much-needed break. But for a company caught in a fierce war for talent, this mandatory vacation is less like a wellness initiative than a panic button.
The narrative of a looming burnout crisis has been slowly building for months. The mission to create godlike intelligence is not a standard nine-to-five job. Reports from the industry describe grueling 80-hour work weeks as the baseline for researchers in the best AI labs. This work has become a crusade that demands full commitment from its adherents. For many years, the promise of achieving AI, a technology that could solve all of humanity’s problems, was enough to fuel this sacrifice. The mission itself was the compensation.
But now this faith is being tested. The catalyst for this apparent crisis is Meta. While OpenAI engineers are tweeting as if they have lost loved ones, Zuckerberg is reportedly assembling a new elite AI team, staffed by former OpenAI and Google DeepMind talent. It’s a quiet, methodical game of preemption that could ultimately tip the AI landscape in his favor, especially if OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, continues to churn out experts.
This is what the “AI revolution” really 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.
The problem of burnout at OpenAI is not new, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide. Over the past two years, the company has experienced several executive departures, including the dramatic and short-lived departure of CEO Sam Altman, a crisis that exposed ongoing internal tensions over security, speed, and power.
Now that top researchers have left the company and others are visibly shaken, the company’s decision to pause for a wellness week looks less like a perk and more like damage control. Is OpenAI trying to solve a deep-seated culture problem with a one-week band-aid? By forcing everyone to log out at the same time, they may be trying to shut down the poaching channel, preventing recruiters from picking up exhausted and isolated workers one by one. This is an attempt to stop the bleeding.
The situation exposes the fundamental tension underlying the pursuit of AGI. Building God is a costly and exhausting endeavor. For the first time, we are seeing the real human cost of this technological arms race. The question for OpenAI is whether a week off is enough to convince its brilliant, burned-out employees that the mission is still worth more than money. For all of us, it’s a sign that even in the world’s most ambitious company, the cult of world-changing technology is starting to crack.
Despite all the headlines about AI taking over the world, what we see at OpenAI is deeply human. Exhaustion. Grief. Uncertainty. Even the best engineers in the most powerful laboratories reach their limits. And the companies that persistently try to “change everything” are, ironically, the ones that are weakening most noticeably under the weight of their own hype.
For AI skeptics, this moment is significant. Not because it proves that AI is not important, but because it shows how fragile the infrastructure really is. Not servers or models, but people. The human brains behind the artificial ones.
If OpenAI is the future, then that future is crying on its timeline and taking a mandatory week of mental health. And if Meta wins the race, it may be because it remained cold and ruthless enough to avoid all of this.
