Thinking Machines co-founder Lilian Weng left the company citing health reasons, then joined OpenAI
“I don’t feel I’m able to continue at the pace a startup requires,” she wrote in an internal Slack message, which she also shared on X. According to a company spokesperson, Weng will lead a top-level team focused on accelerating OpenAI’s internal research. This team will support cross-research work on recursive self-improvement, a process that would allow an AI system to iterate on itself to become more powerful.
- ▪“I don’t feel I’m able to continue at the pace a startup requires,” she wrote in an internal Slack message, which she also shared on X.
- ▪According to a company spokesperson, Weng will lead a top-level team focused on accelerating OpenAI’s internal research.
- ▪This team will support cross-research work on recursive self-improvement, a process that would allow an AI system to iterate on itself to become more powerful.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/thinking-machines-co-founder-lilian-weng-left-the-company-citing-health-reasons-then-joined-openai/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:07:48 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T21:09:29.542Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T21:09:29.542Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | x7aUsMS6BTu- · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In Brief Posted: 2:07 PM PDT · July 29, 2026 Image Credits:Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto / Getty Images Amanda Silberling Thinking Machines co-founder Lilian Weng left the company citing health reasons, then joined OpenAI Lilian Weng, co-founder of Thinking Machines, announced this week that she would step down from her role, citing health issues. “I don’t feel I’m able to continue at the pace a startup requires,” she wrote in an internal Slack message, which she also shared on X. “After thinking about it for several months, I ultimately have to admit that the amount of consistent stress and workload have pushed me beyond what my health can sustain physically.” On Wednesday, OpenAI told TechCrunch that Weng would be rejoining the company, where she previously served as the VP of AI Safety…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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