This Monday 5 August, Schulman announced on his X account that after 9 years where he worked for OpenAI, his goal is now to focus on the next phase of his career. John plans to join the rival of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence startup, funded by Amazon called Anthropic.
"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," John Schulman said in his post.
This news comes shortly after Peter Deng departs from the company and the extended leave of Greg Brockman, OpenAI president, at the end of this year.
According to his biography website, John Schulman had been a co-founder of OpenAI’s post-training team dealing with refining AI models for ChatGPT. Two months ago, as head of alignment science, Schulman said that he would join a safety and security committee that will provide advice to the board.
After receiving a Ph.D in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016 John Schuman started to work for OpenAI for 9 years until now when he decided that the work from OpenAI no longer fulfills his aspirations.
A spokesperson from the artificial intelligence Open AI company states that all the members fully support John’s decision and they are grateful for his major contribution to building the strong foundation of the company- “We’re grateful for John’s contributions as a founding team member at OpenAI and his dedicated efforts in advancing alignment research. His passion and hard work have established a strong foundation that will inspire and support future innovations at OpenAI and the broader field.”
John Schulman is not the first member who left OpenAI to join Anthropic. Jan Leike joined Anthropic in May 2024 as an artificial intelligence alignment researcher. Also, Ilya Sutskever, left earlier this year planning to start a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc.
“Very excited to be working together again!”- Jan Leike wrote in a response to John’s official post.
After John Schulman’s departure, only three of the founders of OpenAI remained in the company. Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, Brockman, and the lead of language and code generation, Wojciech Zaremba are the only members left from the original team.
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