Microsoft said Monday that Sebastien Bubeck, its vice president of GenAI research, is leaving the company and joining ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI.

Microsoft said in a statement that Bubeck will continue to work on developing AGI (generalized artificial intelligence) at OpenAI, adding, “We thank Sebastien for his contributions to Microsoft and look forward to continuing our relationship through his work with OpenAI.”

The addition of Bubeck is certainly a boon for OpenAI, which has recently suffered a number of executive departures.

Bubeck has been at Microsoft for 10 years and has been overseeing the company's work on Phi models, a series of ultra-small language and vision models that are smaller than traditional large language models (LLMs), and these types of smaller models are designed to help push AI applications to edge devices.

As large, centralized models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o give way in some markets to models on devices that work quickly, privately, and offline, the expertise Bubeck is working on becomes increasingly important.

While Bubeck's new role at OpenAI remains a mystery, it's likely that he'll be working on efficiency and small models - an area where OpenAI is currently less prominent in the AI space.