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OpenAI co-founder John Schulman has revealed he will leave OpenAI to join rival Anthropic for “hands-on technical work.”
Schulman, one of the six co-founders of ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, will leave the Microsoft-backed company. Schulman shared his plans in a post on X, where he also announced next steps in his career, which will be to join an OpenAI competitor.
I shared the following note with my OpenAI colleagues today:
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…
— John Schulman (@johnschulman2) August 6, 2024
Schulman announced his plans to join Anthropic where he will be engaged in “hands-on technical work,” the X post read. Notably, Anthropic is backed by a $4 billion investment from Amazon and is the creator of Claude large language models (LLM) and an eponymous chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. He had joined OpenAI in December 2015 shortly before finishing his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.
At OpenAI, Schulman played a pivotal role, leading the team responsible for ChatGPT’s reinforcement learning. ChatGPT uses a specialized version, called reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), allowing human users to pass feedback about the correctness of the responses and, thus, improving them.
Previous Exits Caused by OpenAI’s Internal Turmoil
The news of Schulman’s departure comes just a few months after another co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who also served as OpenAI’s previous chief scientist, left the company citing concerns over the unprecedented growth of AI. This also resulted in upheaval on the company’s board last November, which began with Sam Altman being ousted as CEO and culminated with him returning to the post after more than half of the staff threatened to quit. All of this happened in just one week.
Sutskever was one of the leaders of the coup but continued to work at the company for another six months after Altman returned. After leaving OpenAI in May this year, he co-founded a new venture to work towards “safe superintelligence” – which also happens to be its name.
Before Schulman and Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s previous lead safety researchers, Jan Leike, left the company to join Anthropic. Leike reportedly left just days before OpenAI decided to dissolve the team initially formulated to prepare for any long-term risks associated with AI and eventual progression towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). Leike also congratulated Schulman on the move.
Very excited to be working together again!
— Jan Leike (@janleike) August 6, 2024
Refuting speculation, Schulman wrote in the X post “I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI.” He added, “I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.”
