OpenAI co-founder John Schulman quits to join rival Anthropic
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OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving the company to join Anthropic, an Amazon (AMZN)-backed artificial intelligence startup that developed the large language model Claude, which rivals ChatGPT.
“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,” Schulman said on social media platform X. “I’ve decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives.”
Schulman’s departure comes less than three months after Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI disbanded its Superalignment team, which was working on ensuring that people could control superintelligence, a future AI system vastly smarter than humans.
The leaders of the team, Ilya Sutskever (another OpenAI co-founder) and Jan Leike, left the company this year. Sutskever has started a new company, while Leike works with Anthropic.
After Leike quit OpenAI, Schulman headed the company’s post-training team, which fine-tunes models deployed in ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. “To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI,” Schulman clarified.
With Schulman’s exit, only three of OpenAI’s 11 co-founders remain: CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman and Wojciech Zaremba. Brockman said he will take a sabbatical through the end of the year.