The war for artificial intelligence becomes personal.
In the last days, after multiple OpenI researchers on the left The Meta company, one remaining employee has been publicly broken. “Not too many people outside the company know how talented and hardcore they are,” Cheng Lu, a member of the technical staff at Openai, posted on X on June 29, commenting on a poster announcing that Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, or “Zuck”, released four elite Chinese researchers.
He continued: “Such a huge loss to Openai and I feel really disappointed that the leadership did not keep them.”
The poster, which was later removed, quickly went viral. It revealed something Silicon Valley prefers to stay hidden: the emotional and psychological cost of building the so -called future of intelligence.
Even Openai employees confirm the extent of the loss of researchers to Meta. pic.twitter.com/bsze21frpu
– Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) June 29, 2025
This raw showing of hired sadness comes as Wired Reports that Openai turns off all week, forcing his stick to rest and reload after an incessant push for creating artificial general intelligence (ACT). Inside, it is framed as a much needed break. But for a company locked up in a brutal talented war, this compulsory holiday feels less like a charitable initiative and more like a panic button.
The storytelling of an upcoming burning crisis has been quietly built for months. The mission to build a god-like intelligence is not standard nine to five jobs. Reports from within the industry describe nasty, 80-hour jobs as the baseline for researchers at top AI laboratories. This work became a crusade, demanding overall devotion from its acolytes. For years, the promise to achieve acting, a technology that could solve all the problems of humanity has been enough to feed this sacrifice. The mission itself was the compensation.
But now, that faith is tried. The catalyst for this apparent crisis is meta. While Openai Engineers tweeted, as they lost loved ones, Zuckerberg is said to meet a new elite AI team, stored by former Openai and Google Deepmind talent. It is a quiet, methodical power game that will eventually bend the AI landscape in favor, especially if Openai, the Chatgpt developer, continues to bleed expertise.
This is what the “AI revolution” looks like 2025. Not just lines of coding and chatting manifestations, but emotional breaks, brain dive and billionaires treating research laboratories as fantasy football teams.
Openai’s burning problem is not new, but it’s getting harder to hide. The company has cleared multiple executive departures over the past two years, including the dramatic and short shot of Director -General Sam Altman, a crisis that has exposed constant internal tensions due to safety, speed and power.
Now, with top researchers defective and others visibly shaken, the company’s decision to pause for Wellness Week feels less as an advantage and more like a damaging control. Is Openai trying to fix a deep cultural problem with a one-week band aid? Forcing everyone to log in at the same time, they may try to shorten the beating, preventing recruiters to choose exhausted and isolated employees one by one. It’s an attempt to sting the bleeding.
The situation exhibits the fundamental tension in the heart of the action seeking. Building God is expensive and exhausting business. For the first time, we see the very real human cost of this technological weapon race. The question for Openai is whether a week of a week is enough to convince its brilliant, burned employees that the mission is still worth more than the money. For the rest of us, it is a sign that even in the world’s most ambitious company, the cult of world change technology begins to show its cracks.
For all titles about AI taking over the world, what we see at Openai is deeply human. Exhaustion. Sadness. Uncertainty. Even the best engineers in the most powerful laboratories reach their limits. And the companies mostly driven to “change everything” are, ironically, those most visibly striking under the weight of their own Hype.
For ai -skeptics, this moment reveals. Not because it proves AI doesn’t matter, but because it shows how fragile the infrastructure really is. Not the servers or the models, but the people. The human brains behind the artificial.
If Openai is the future, then the future cries for its timeline and takes a mental health week. And if Meta wins the race, it can be because it has remained only cold and merciless to avoid everything.
Openai did not respond to a request for comment.
