The relentless pace of AI is taking its toll on people working to develop it. And more so given how powerful is AI as a technology, putting pressure on people shaping it to get it ethically and morally right. Earlier we saw Anthropic safety lead Mrinank Sharma leave his company, opting to write poetry over a lucrative career in tech. Now, OpenAI engineer Hieu Pham has announced that he is leaving his company and going to Vietnam with his family so that he can “heal” and find “cure for my condition.”
Pham, worked as a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI. He was earlier at xAI and Google Brain. In a post on X, he has announced his decision to step away from frontier AI labs to focus on his health. In his post, Pham spoke about the intensity of the work and the pride it brought, but admitted it had begun to take a toll on his health.
“I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. Working here and at xAI before was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I have met the best people. The work makes me proud,” he wrote on X. “But the intensive work came with a price. I cannot believe I would say this one day, but I am burnt out. All the mental health deterioration that I used to scoff at is real, miserable, scary and dangerous.”
This comes weeks after Pham called AI an existential threat. On X earlier in February he wrote, “Today, I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing. When AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do? And it’s when, not if.”
Moving to Vietnam to heal
The OpenAI engineer notes that he plans to step away from frontier AI labs and return to his home country, Vietnam, with his family to focus on healing and recovery.
“I am going to take a break from frontier AI labs, and will take my family to my home country Vietnam,” he wrote. “There, I will try something new, and also search for a cure for my conditions. I hope I will heal.”
Pham’s decision to step away from AI labs comes at a time when AI companies like Google, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic are accelerating work on AI to outdo each other. A few months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced code red to ask employees to accelerate the work on ChatGPT’s next model, following the launch of Google’s Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s Claude. Meanwhile, Google and Anthropic are dropping new features for Gemini and Claude on an almost daily basis, trying to stay ahead of the competition.
After Pham posted his public resignation, his views have found support from a few other tech insiders. Raj Dabre, a senior AI researcher at Google, agreed that the intensity of work at AI labs is extreme. “Operating at the frontier is no joke. Sure, we get paid a lot but it takes an insane toll when you are under enormous pressure to perform. At one point one wonders if it’s all worth it. Glad this is being said out loud,” Dabre wrote on X.
The OpenAI engineer is not alone in feeling existential threat from AI, or feeling blues brought about by the intense pace of AI. Earlier, Mrinank Sharma, who led the Safeguards Research Team at Anthropic resigned, while cautioning that “the world is in peril”. Sharma said he felt “called to writing” and planned to pursue poetry instead of continuing in AI research.
Meanwhile, at xAI, co-founder Greg Yang also stepped back after revealing he had been diagnosed with Lyme disease. While his decision was primarily driven by the need to focus on treatment, he admitted that he may have pushed himself too hard while building the AI company, suggesting the intense pace could have worsened his condition.
