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- Dave Willner, OpenAI's head of trust and safety, stepped down from his role.
- The exec said on LinkedIn it's become harder to spend time with his family since ChatGPT came out.
- He's spending the summer teaching his kids to bike and swim, and will take on an advisory role at the firm.
AI may replace your job one day, but it can't replace the time you spend with your kids — even for those at the forefront of the artificial intelligence push.
Dave Willner, the head of trust and safety OpenAI, announced on Thursday in a LinkedIn post that he is stepping down from his executive role at the company to prioritize his work-life balance. The resignation, he said, was a "pretty easy choice to make."
Willner did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
While Willner called his job leading OpenAI's safety efforts "one of the coolest and most interesting jobs it's possible to have today," he said that it "had also grown dramatically in its scope and scale" since he joined the company in February 2022. He said it's become "more and more difficult" to put his family's needs ahead of his work ever since ChatGPT was launched last November.
"OpenAI is going through a high-intensity phase in its development — and so are our kids," Willner wrote in his LinkedIn post. "Anyone with young children and a super intense job can relate to that tension, I think, and these past few months have really crystallized for me that I was going to have to prioritize one or the other."
Willner said he will spend this summer teaching his kids how to swim and ride their bikes, and joked that he will get business cards with the title "Charlotte's Official Hype Man," referring to his wife and fellow trust and safety professional Charlotte Willner.
Willner's announcement received support from his fellow tech professionals — including those in managerial roles at Meta, Google, and AirBnb —in the comments section of his LinkedIn post. Commenters called Willner's choice to step down "smart" and "inspiring," and said he was "brave" for being open about his shifting priorities.
"Thank you for being transparent about the need to balance family and work!" Vaishnavi J, the head of youth policy at Meta, wrote in a comment. "We need to hear more of this, especially from husbands / dads."
Willner is among a number of executives who have reassessed their relationships to their work, and as a result, stepped down from their roles to combat an unhealthy work-life balance
Still, while some C-suite leaders say they're looking to embrace work-life balance, others say they seek work-life integration, or the ability to multi-task with personal responsibilities and work. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, rejects the phrase "work-life balance" all together, as it implies a trade-off between life and work.
Regarding Willner's resignation, an OpenAI spokesperson said, "His work has been foundational in operationalizing our commitment to the safe and responsible use of our technology, and has paved the way for future progress in this field."
As for OpenAI's now vacant role, the spokesperson said the company is "seeking a technically-skilled lead" to "advance our mission" of building AI that's safe.
In the mean time, Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, will "directly manage" the trust and safety team, the spokesperson said. Willner "will continue to advise through the end of the year," per OpenAI.