According to Business Insider, the latest cost of the artificial intelligence industry may be the health of some of the people who built it.
Lilian Weng, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, said that she would step down from her current position due to prolonged stress and health problems. Weng previously worked at OpenAI. She did not disclose the specific condition she had developed, but said that she had been sick more times in the past seven months than during any other period of her life.
“I feel that I can no longer maintain the pace of work required by a startup,” Weng said in a note to her colleagues.
She is not the only person affected, as the internet’s reaction to her departure makes clear. The highly intense AI competition is placing increasing pressure on those involved.
Earlier this year, OpenAI executive Fidji Simo took medical leave and subsequently left her full-time role entirely, transitioning to a part-time advisory position. Simo previously served as a Meta executive and as CEO of Instacart. She has postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a chronic condition that can cause symptoms including palpitations, dizziness, and fainting.
Greg Yang, co-founder of xAI, also transitioned to an informal advisory role after being diagnosed with Lyme disease. Yang said that he sometimes slept 12 hours a day and still could not regain his energy, adding that he needed to “enter founder mode when it comes to my health issues.”
Over the past few years, the tech industry has been promoting going “hardcore” and entering “founder mode” in order to compete. Tech executives being physically and mentally exhausted by such an intense pace of work should prompt the industry as a whole to reconsider this approach to competition.
But the reality is that the AI race will not stop because anyone leaves. Trillions of dollars in market opportunities are at stake, while the industry broadly believes that any slowdown could result in a loss of competitive advantage.
It is worth noting that executives who choose to leave are often one level removed from the company’s top decision-makers. The CEOs of these companies, meanwhile, remain firmly in their positions.
One of the few recent health-related departures involving a top leader was the case of C3.ai founder and CEO Tom Siebel, which is also quite representative. Siebel resigned as CEO in 2025 after an autoimmune disease caused vision problems, but returned to lead the company again in May this year. He told CNBC at the time that the company’s previous performance was “frankly unacceptable.”