OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving the company to join Anthropic

OpenAIone of the founding members of Andrej Karpathy ve Ilya SutskeverAfter the separation of OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving the company to join OpenAI rival Anthropic. At this point, we should point out that Anthropic was founded by former employees of OpenAI.

Meltdown at OpenAI

The OpenAI meltdown doesn’t end there. OpenAI president Greg Brockman also an extended leave until the end of the year taking. Brockman says he took this leave to “rest and recharge” after nine years at the company.

Additionally, the company confirmed that Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year, also left some time ago. Deng previously led products at Enterprise, Meta, Uber and Airtable.

We are witnessing key talent leaving OpenAI. John Schulman had led OpenAI’s reinforcement training organization, which fine-tuned generative AI models to follow human instructions. In this way, Schulman played an important role in the creation of the artificial intelligence-supported chatbot platform ChatGPT. Following the departure of AI security researcher Jan Leike, who now works at Anthropic, Schulman became head of OpenAI’s compliance science efforts, also known as the “post-training” team.

Why did John Schulman leave?

Going back to John Schulman’s departure; Schulman made his decision today at X a post he shared He announced with. Schulman said his decision stemmed from his desire to deepen his focus on AI alignment and do more applied technical work. Artificial intelligence alignment is the science of ensuring that artificial intelligence behaves as intended. Schulman continued his words as follows:

“I decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and conduct research with people who are deeply interested in the topics that interest me most.”

“I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I am a part of will continue to thrive without me.”

Although OpenAI has been criticized for some time for its approach to AI security research, Schulman said he did not leave OpenAI due to a lack of support. Stating that company leaders were very determined to invest in compliance research, Schulman stated that his decision was a personal decision for his career.

Sam Altman and OpenAI’s reaction

Sam Altman, A post shared on X He thanked Schulman for everything he did for OpenAI:

“You were a great researcher, a deep thinker about product and society, and most importantly, a great friend to all of us. We will miss you very much and make you proud of this place.”

By the way, it is worth remembering that John Schulman sided with Altman during last year’s failed board coup.

An OpenAI spokesperson shared the following statement about Schulman:

“We are grateful for John’s contributions as a founding team member at OpenAI and his dedicated efforts to advance alignment research. His passion and hard work have created a strong foundation that will inspire and support future innovations at OpenAI and the broader field.”

Meanwhile, Jan Leike responded to Schulman’s post and stated that he was very excited to work together again.

Schulman is also a member of OpenAI’s recently established security committee. let’s remind. It is not yet known who will replace Schulman.

With Schulman’s departure, only three of OpenAI’s 11 original founders remain: Sam Altman, Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba.