OpenAI co-founder exits ChatGPT maker to join rival Anthropic
Schulman's decision to join Anthropic comes after leaders of OpenAI's superalignment team left this year
August 06, 2024
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced his departure from the Microsoft-backed company on Monday, saying that he will be joining Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup funded by Amazon.
The move follows the disbandment of a superalignment team at Sam Altman's tech firm that focused on trying to ensure that people can control AI systems that exceed human capability at many tasks.
Both leaders of the superalignment team, Jan Leike and company co-founder Ilya Sutskever, left this year.
Leike joined Anthropic while Sutskever said he was helping to start a new company, Safe Superintelligence.
In a lengthy post on X, Schulman wrote: "I've made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. 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.
"I've decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I'm most interested in."
He added: "My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career."
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 PhD in computer science in 2016 from the University of California, Berkeley.
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.
Additionally, Greg Brockman, president and another co-founder of OpenAI, announced on Monday that he was taking a sabbatical for the rest of the year.
