In a surprising move, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman has left the company to join its competitor, Anthropic. Greg Brockman, another co-founder and the president of OpenAI, has shared that he will be on a “sabbatical” until the year’s end. This news was first reported by The Information and later confirmed by Schulman and Brockman on X, suggesting that OpenAI’s leadership is undergoing some changes.
Earlier this year, in May, Jan Leike also left OpenAI to join Anthropic, citing concerns about insufficient resources for alignment research and safety issues. Following Leike’s departure, Schulman took over as the head of alignment research at OpenAI and was recently appointed to the OpenAI Safety Committee. Given these recent developments, Schulman’s resignation comes as an unexpected surprise.
That said, Schulman highlighted that “To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area.” His decision to join Anthropic is more of a “personal” choice, driven by a desire to gain, “new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in.”
Greg Brockman, a close associate of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, recently shared the announcement, “I’m taking a sabbatical through end of year. First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build.“
It’s important to note that Ilya Sutskever, another co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, has also recently departed from the company to start his new venture, Safe Superintelligence Inc. With several founding members leaving, only three remain at OpenAI: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba.
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