OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will leave and join rival Anthropic

Published Mon, Aug 5 202410:33 PM EDT

ShareShare Article via FacebookShare Article via TwitterShare Article via LinkedInShare Article via Email

Key Points

John Schulman worked to refine models that go into OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
After two safety leaders left, the startup said Schulman would join a safety and security committee.
Schulman said OpenAI executives have been committed to the area.

The ChatGPT chat screen on a smartphone arranged in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Thursday, March 9, 2023. ChatGPT has made writing computer code and cheating on homework easier. Soon, it could make email scams a cinch. That’s the warning from Darktrace Plc, the British cybersecurity firm.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said in a Monday X post that he would leave the Microsoft-backed company and join Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup with funding from Amazon.

The move comes less than three months after OpenAI disbanded a superalignment team that focused on trying to ensure that people can control AI systems that exceed human capability at many tasks.

Schulman had been a co-leader of OpenAI’s post-training team that refined AI models for the ChatGPT chatbot and a programming interface for third-party developers, according to a biography on his website. In June, OpenAI said Schulman, as head of alignment science, would join a safety and security committee that would provide advice to the board. Schulman has only worked at OpenAI since receiving a Ph.D. in computer science in 2016 from the University of California, Berkeley.

“This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work,” Schulman wrote in the social media post.

He said he wasn’t leaving because of a lack of support for new work on the topic at OpenAI.

“On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area,” he said.

The leaders of the superalignment team, Jan Leike and company co-founder Ilya Sutskever, both left this year. Leike joined Anthropic, while Sutskever said he was helping to start a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Since OpenAI staff members established Anthropic in 2021, the two young San Francisco-based businesses have been battling to have the most performant generative AI models that can come up with human-like text. Amazon, Google and Meta have also developed large language models.

“Very excited to be working together again!” Leike wrote in reply to Schulman’s message.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a post of his own that Schulman’s perspective informed the startup’s early strategy.

Schulman and others chose to leave after the board pushed out Altman as chief last November. Employees protested the decision, prompting Sutskever and two other board members, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, to resign. Altman was reinstated and OpenAI took on additional board members.

Toner said on a podcast that Altman had given the board incorrect information about the “small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place.”

The law firm WilmerHale found in an independent review that the board wasn’t concerned about product safety when it pushed out Altman.

Last week, Altman said on X that OpenAI “has been working with the US AI Safety Institute on an agreement where we would provide early access to our next foundation model so that we can work together to push forward the science of AI evaluations.” Altman said OpenAI is still committed to keeping 20% of its computing resources for safety initiatives.

Also on Monday, Greg Brockman, another co-founder of OpenAI and its president, announced that he was taking a sabbatical for the rest of the year.

WATCH: OpenAI announces a search engine called SearchGPT

watch now

VIDEO04:55

OpenAI announces a search engine called SearchGPT

Japan stocks rebound more than 10% after historic losses; other Asia markets also recover

Warren Buffett’s decision to sell stocks and raise record cash before sell-off sends wake-up call

Ukraine finally sends F-16s into the battle against Russia — but they might not be a game-changer

‘Never quit your job,’ says early retiree and self-made multimillionaire: Do this instead

by Taboola