On Tuesday, Lilian Weng said she was stepping down from Thinking Machines Lab because the job was making her ill. On Wednesday, she was back at OpenAI.
Weng co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer. She is rejoining OpenAI to work on recursive self-improvement, or using AI models to build better AI models, The Information reported.
‘Beyond what my health can sustain’
Her exit note was stark. Weng said she had been ill more often in the past seven months than at any point in her life, and did not name a diagnosis. The “consistent stress and workload,” she wrote, had pushed her “beyond what my health can sustain physically,” Business Insider reported.
She said she tried to rest while the lab sprinted to ship Inkling, its first open-weight model, but felt guilt. She had weighed a narrower role and decided it was not a fit. She wanted something “more predictable” and “scoped,” while staying in AI. “The future worth building is human,” she wrote on X.
The role she took is not the calmer one
What she returned to is not obviously that calmer job. Recursive self-improvement, using AI to build better AI, is one of the most consequential and contested problems in the field. It is the frontier the whole race is sprinting toward.
There is an irony in it. A researcher who just hit her own human limits is going to work on machines that are meant to have none. Her recursive self-improvement brief puts her at the very edge of the technology.
She is not the only one
Weng’s health exit fits a pattern. Fidji Simo stepped back from a top OpenAI role this month after a flare-up of a chronic illness. In January, xAI co-founder Greg Yang moved to an advisory role after a Lyme disease diagnosis. He said he needed to “go founder mode” on his health.
The people stepping away tend to sit one level below the chief executive. Some Silicon Valley AI teams run “996” schedules, 9am to 9pm, six days a week. The bosses at the top mostly stay put, and the race does not slow down.
A lab losing its founders
The move thins Thinking Machines further. By May, 13 of the lab’s 42 founding members had left, including three of its six co-founders, as Meta and OpenAI dangled huge pay packages. “We’ll miss you,” Murati wrote in reply. “I’m glad that you’re putting your health first.”
Read one way, this is a person choosing her health, and a former employer welcoming her back. Read another, it is the AI race proving it can pull even its burned-out talent straight back in. Weng wanted a slower lane. She got the fastest problem in the field.
