My conspiracy theory hat is that somehow investors with a stake in openai as well is sabotaging, like they did when kicking emad out of stabilityai
apples v.s. oranges. The later is true, Emad did get sabotaged (for not being able to raise money in time, about 8-month before he's leaving). Junyang didn't have that long arc of incidents.
More likely some high ranking party member's nepobaby from Gemini sniffed success with Qwen and the original folks just walked away as their reward disappeared.