Joanne Jang, a key executive who helped shape some of the top capabilities and personality of the world’s most popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools, has announced her departure from OpenAI after four and a half years. Jang served as the company’s Head of Model Behavior and was recognized on the TIME100 AI 2025 list.
She shared the news of her resignation in a heartfelt, nostalgic message to her colleagues on the company’s internal Slack channel.
Jang has legacy of major AI releases at OpenAI
Jang joined OpenAI when it was still a relatively small research lab with fewer than 200 employees. During her tenure, she witnessed massive corporate growth and played a role in bringing some of the company’s most famous products to the public. Her key contributions included work on:GPT-4 and the Chat API, DALL-E 2 image generation, Text-to-Speech and Memory features for ChatGPT.
Read full note she sent to employees on Slack
Hi! After 4.5 years, I’m leaving OpenAI.I joined when OpenAI was still a research lab under 200 people. It’s felt like I’ve worked at at least three different companies since then, and I’ve had so much fun in each one.I got to help bring GPT-4, DALL-E 2, Text-to-Speech, Chat API, and Memory to the world. I got to build model behavior as a discipline — from designing personality for 4o, 4.5, and 03 through post-training / RL to building eval flywheels grounded in real-world use. I’m especially proud of how we fought for user freedom & transparency, even when it was the harder call. And most recently, I got to start OpenAI Labs, where the team’s been cooking up genuinely refreshing interfaces for people & AI [more in thread… But if I were to be remembered for one thing, I hope it’s that I brought froges and pink text to OpenAI.Whatever dent I was able to make was because people took a chance on me and on work that was exploratory, creative, and not always obviously valuable at first.Leadership made room for it and protected it. People in Model Behavior & Labs left their very real jobs to build something from nothing with me — becoming the first-ever model designers, inventing new ways for people to interact with AI, etc. They’re some of the most curious, creative, courageous, and mischievous people I know, and I’ve learned so much from them.OpenAI has never been a normal company, and I hope it never becomes too normal. I’ve loved that our culture allows for thinking and doing things in unconventional ways. Please keep doing that – I’ll be rooting for you all!With lots and lots and lots of love,Joanne
