John Schulman, one in all the co-founders of OpenAI, has left the corporate and moved to competing AI startup Anthropic.
In addition, after nine years with the corporate, OpenAI President Greg Brockman is taking an prolonged break – until the top of the yr – to “chill out and recharge,” the corporate confirmed.
Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last yr after leading products at Meta, Uber and Airtable, also left the corporate a while ago, the corporate confirmed. News of Brockman and Deng's departures was previously reported by The information.
A spokesperson issued the next statement about Schulman: “We are grateful for John's contributions as a founding member of the OpenAI team and his dedicated efforts to advance alignment research. His passion and labor have built a robust foundation that can encourage and support future innovation at OpenAI and in the broader field.”
Schulman Posted on today's decision on X, saying it was born out of a desire to sharpen its deal with AI alignment – ​​the science that ensures AI behaves as intended – and to devote more time to hands-on engineering work.
“I made a decision to pursue that goal at Anthropic, where I imagine I can gain latest perspectives and conduct research with people who find themselves deeply engaged within the topics I’m most desirous about,” said Schulman. “I’m confident that OpenAI and the teams I used to be a component of will proceed to thrive without me.”
Schulman's involvement with OpenAI began shortly after he accomplished a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. He played a critical role in developing the AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT by leading OpenAI's reinforcement training organization, which optimizes generative AI models to follow human instructions.
Following the departure of AI security researcher Jan Leike (who now also works at Anthropic), Schulman took over as leader of OpenAI's alignment science efforts, also generally known as the “post-training” team. He also served on OpenAI's recently formed security committee; it’s unclear who might replace Schulman in that role.
Despite the controversy surrounding OpenAI, particularly regarding the corporate's approach and handling of AI safety research, Schulman said he won’t leave OpenAI due to a scarcity of support.
“The company's leadership has been very committed to investing in (alignment research),” Schulman said. “My decision is a private one which is determined by how I need to focus my efforts in the following phase of my profession.”
With Schulman's departure, only three of OpenAI's original 11 founders remain: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Brockman and Wojciech Zaremba, head of language and code generation.
“Thank you for every part you could have done for OpenAI!” wrote Altman wrote in a post on X. “You are a superb researcher, a deep thinker about products and society, and most of all, a fantastic friend to all of us. We will miss you terribly and make you pleased with this place.”
