ChatGPT chat screen on a smartphone in Brooklyn, New York, USA, Thursday, March 9, 2023. Soon, it will make email scams a breeze. This is the warning issued by Darktrace Plc, a British cyber security company.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said in a Monday X post that he will be leaving Microsoft– Supported companies and joined Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup with funding from Amazon.
The move comes less than three months after OpenAI dismantled a hyper-coordinated team focused on ensuring people can control artificial intelligence systems that exceed human capabilities at many tasks.
According to a profile on Schulman’s website, Schulman was a co-leader of the OpenAI post-production training team, which refined the AI models for the ChatGPT chatbot and programming interfaces for third-party developers. In June, OpenAI said Schulman, who serves as director of alignment science, would join a safety and security committee that will advise the board of directors. Schulman worked at OpenAI after receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016.
“This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on artificial intelligence and start a new chapter in my career that will allow me to return to actual technical work,” Schulman wrote in a social media post.
He said he would not leave because of OpenAI’s lack of support for new work on the topic.
“On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area,” he said.
Super League team leader Jan Leike and company co-founder Ilya Sutskever both left this year. Leike has joined Anthropic, and Sutskever said he is helping launch a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Since Anthropic was founded by OpenAI employees in 2021, the two young San Francisco-based companies have been competing for the highest-performing generative AI models capable of producing human-like text. Amazon, Google, and Meta have also developed large language models.
“It’s a pleasure to work together again!” Lake wrote in response to Shulman’s message.
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said in an article of his own that Schulman’s views influenced the startup’s early strategy.
Schulman and others left after the board ousted Altman as CEO in November. Employees protested the decision, prompting Sutskover and two other board members, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, to resign. Altman reinstated, OpenAI adds board members.
Toner said on the podcast that Altman gave the board misinformation about “the few formal safety processes the company did have in place.”
An independent review by law firm WilmerHale found that the board had no concerns about product safety when it ousted Altman.
Last week, Altman said at Said that OpenAI is still committed to reserving 20% of computing resources for security measures.
Also on Monday, OpenAI’s other co-founder and president Greg Brockman announced that he would be taking a leave of absence for the remainder of the year.
watch: OpenAI launches search engine called SearchGPT
