Indian Google scient backs OpenAI techie who quit over mental health: ‘We get paid a lot but…’
A Google techie has reacted to an OpenAI employee quitting his job over burnout and declining mental health, saying that “operating at the frontier is no joke”. Raj Dabre, a Senior Research Scient at Google Research Australia, was responding to a post Hieu Pham, who recently announced that he had made the “difficult decision” to leave OpenAI. Pham had earlier worked at xAI.Raj Dabre is a senior research scient at Google. (X/@prajdabre)In his post, Pham described his time at both companies as a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” and said he had met “the best people.”“At these companies, I have helped creating extremely intelligent entities that will meaningfully improve our lives. The work makes me proud. But the intensive work came with a price. I cannot believe I would say this one day, but I am burnt out,” he wrote.He added that the mental health deterioration he once “scoffed at” is “real, miserable, scary, and dangerous.”Pham said he would step away from “frontier AI labs” and return to Vietnam with his family to recover and “search for a cure” for his conditions. “I hope I will heal,” he wrote.Reacting to the post, Dabre said, “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.”(Also Read:
