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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 Claude, a large language model that competes with ChatGPT.
“This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on artificial intelligence adjustments and Starting a new chapter in my career where I can return to hands-on technical work,” Schulman explain on social media platform X.
Schulman’s departure comes less than three months after Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI disbanded its Superalignment team, which was working to ensure people could control superintelligence, a future class of artificial intelligence systems that are much smarter than humans.
The team’s leaders Ilya Sutskever (another OpenAI co-founder) and Jan Leike left the company this year. Sutskever started a new company, while Leike teamed up with Anthropic.
After Leike exited OpenAI, Schulman led the company’s post-production training team, which fine-tuned models deployed in ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. “To be clear, I’m not leaving OpenAI because of its lack of support for alignment research,” Schulman clarified.
With Schulman’s exit, only three of OpenAI’s 11 co-founders remain: CEO Sam Altman, presidents Greg Brockman and Wojciech Zaremba. Brockman said he will take a leave of absence at the end of the year.
