John Schulman, one of OpenAI's co-founders, has left the company to join competitor AI startup Anthropic.
Furthermore, after nine years at OpenAI, president Greg Brockman is taking an extended vacation until the end of the year to "relax and recharge," according to the company.
Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year after overseeing products at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, has also left, the business stated. The Information previously reported on Brockman and Deng's exits.
A spokeswoman for Schulman stated, "We're appreciative for John's contributions as a founding team member at OpenAI and his focused efforts to advance alignment research. His passion and hard work have laid a solid platform for future advances at OpenAI and in the broader sector."
Schulman announced the decision on X today, citing a desire to increase his attention on AI alignment — the science of ensuring AI acts as planned — and engage in more 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," Schulman told the crowd. "I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me."
Schulman’s involvement with OpenAI began shortly after he completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. He played a pivotal role in creating the AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT by leading OpenAI’s reinforcement training org, which fine-tunes generative AI models to follow human instructions.
After Jan Leike, an AI safety researcher who now works at Anthropic, left, Schulman became the head of OpenAI's alignment science efforts, also known as the "post-training" team. He was also a member of OpenAI's recently formed safety committee; it's unclear who might replace Schulman in that role. Despite the controversies surrounding OpenAI's approach to AI safety research, Schulman said.
With Schulman's departure, only three of OpenAI's 11 original founders remain: CEO Sam Altman, Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba, lead of language and code generation. Altman expressed gratitude for Schulman's contributions to OpenAI, stating, "You are a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about product and society, and mostly, you are a great friend to all of us. We will miss you tremendously and make you proud of this place."