OpenAI has disbanded its team focused on the long-term risks of artificial intelligence just one year after the company announced the group, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC on Friday.

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that some of the team members are being re-assigned to multiple other teams within the company.

The news comes days after both team leaders, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, announced their departures from the Microsoft-backed startup. Leike on Friday wrote that OpenAI’s “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”

The news was first reported by Wired.

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, announced last year, has focused on “scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us.” At the time, OpenAI said it would commit 20% of its computing power to the initiative over four years.

Sutskever and Leike on Tuesday announced their departures on X, hours apart, but on Friday, Leike shared more details about why he left the startup.

“I joined because I thought OpenAI would be the best place in the world to do this research,” Leike wrote on X. “However, I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.”

Leike wrote that he believes much more of the company’s bandwidth should be focused on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety and societal impact.

“These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there,” he wrote. “Over the past few months my team has been sailing against the wind. Sometimes we were struggling for compute and it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done.”

Leike added that OpenAI must become a “safety-first AGI company.”

“Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor,” he wrote. “OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity. But over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”

Leike did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and OpenAI did not immediately provide a comment.

The high-profile departures come months after OpenAI went through a leadership crisis involving co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.

In November, OpenAI’s board ousted Altman, claiming in a statement that Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.”

The issue seemed to grow more complex each following day, with The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reporting that Sutskever trained his focus on ensuring that artificial intelligence would not harm humans, while others, including Altman, were instead more eager to push ahead with delivering new technology.

Altman’s ouster prompted resignations – or threats of resignations – including an open letter signed by virtually all of OpenAI’s employees, and uproar from investors, including Microsoft. Within a week, Altman was back at the company, and board members Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley and Ilya Sutskever, who had voted to oust Altman, were out. Sutskever stayed on staff at the time but no longer in his capacity as a board member. Adam D’Angelo, who had also voted to oust Altman, remained on the board.

When Altman was asked about Sutskever’s status on a Zoom call with reporters in March, he said there were no updates to share. “I love Ilya… I hope we work together for the rest of our careers, my career, whatever,” Altman said. “Nothing to announce today.”

On Tuesday, Altman shared his thoughts on Sutskever’s departure.

“This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend,” Altman wrote on X. “His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important.” Altman said research director Jakub Pachocki, who has been at OpenAI since 2017, will replace Sutskever as chief scientist.

News of Sutskever’s and Leike’s departures, and the dissolution of the superalignment team, come days after OpenAI launched a new AI model and desktop version of ChatGPT, along with an updated user interface, the company’s latest effort to expand the use of its popular chatbot.

The update brings the GPT-4 model to everyone, including OpenAI’s free users, technology chief Mira Murati said Monday in a livestreamed event. She added that the new model, GPT-4o, is “much faster,” with improved capabilities in text, video and audio.

OpenAI said it eventually plans to allow users to video chat with ChatGPT. “This is the first time that we are really making a huge step forward when it comes to the ease of use,” Murati said.

The problem and the solution

As part of Tesla’s massive restructuring, the electric-vehicle maker notified the California Employment Development Department this week that it’s cutting approximately 600 more employees at its manufacturing facilities and engineering offices between Fremont and Palo Alto.

The latest round of layoffs eliminated roles across the board — from entry-level positions to directors — and hit an array of departments, impacting factory workers, software developers and robotics engineers.

The cuts were reported in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act filing that CNBC obtained through a public records request.

Facing both weakening demand for Tesla electric vehicles and increased competition, the company has been slashing its headcount since at least January. CEO Elon Musk told employees in a memo in April that the company would cut more than 10% of its global workforce, which totaled 140,473 employees at the end of 2023.

Previous filings revealed that Tesla would cut more than 6,300 jobs across California; Austin, Texas; and Buffalo, New York.

Musk said on Tesla’s quarterly earnings call on April 23 that the company had built up a 25% to 30% “inefficiency” over the past several years, implying the layoffs underway could impact tens of thousands more employees than the 10% number would suggest.

According to the WARN filing, the 378 job cuts in Fremont, home to Tesla’s first U.S. manufacturing plant, included people involved in staffing and running vehicle assembly. There were 65 cuts at the company’s Kato Rd. battery development center.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Among the highest-level roles eliminated in Fremont were an environmental health and safety director and a user experience design director.

In Palo Alto, home to the company’s engineering headquarters, 233 more employees, including two directors of technical programs, lost their jobs.

Tesla has also terminated a majority of employees involved in designing and improving apps made for customers and employees, according to two former employees directly familiar with the matter. The WARN filing shows that to be the case, with many cut from the team at Tesla’s Hanover Street location in Palo Alto.

Tesla faces reduced demand for cars it makes in Fremont, including its older Model S and X vehicles and Model 3 sedan. Total deliveries dropped in the first quarter from a year earlier, and Tesla reported its steepest year-over-year revenue decline since 2012.

An onslaught of competition, especially in China, has continued to pressure Tesla’s sales in the second quarter. Xiaomi and Nio have each launched new EV models, which undercut the price of Tesla’s most popular vehicles.

Tesla’s stock price has tumbled about 30% so far this year, while the S&P 500 is up 11%.

Musk has been trying to convince investors not to focus on vehicle sales and instead to back Tesla’s potential to finally deliver self-driving software, a robotaxi, and a “sentient” humanoid robot. Musk and Tesla have long promised customers self-driving software that would turn their existing EVs into robotaxis, but the company’s systems still require constant human supervision.

Other recent job cuts at Tesla included the team responsible for building out the Supercharger, or electric-vehicle fast-charging network, in the U.S.

Tesla disclosed plans in its annual filing for 2023 to grow and optimize its charging infrastructure “to ensure cost effectiveness and customer satisfaction.” Tesla said in the filing that it needed to expand its “network in order to ensure adequate availability to meet customer demands,” after other auto companies announced plans to adopt the North American Charging Standard.

Since cutting most of its Supercharger team, Tesla has reportedly started to rehire at least some members, a move reminiscent of the job cuts Musk made at Twitter after he bought the company and later rebranded it as X. Musk told CNBC’s David Faber last year that he wanted to rehire some of those he let go.

Read the latest WARN filing in California here: