Former OpenAI executive Jan Leike announced on Tuesday that he has joined OpenAI’s Amazon-backed rival Anthropic. Lake resigned from OpenAI less than two weeks ago, publicly criticizing the company for prioritizing “shiny products” over important “security culture and processes.”
OpenAI’s Altman and Brock resign in high profile
Leike posted on X expressing his enthusiasm for Anthropic’s new character. Interestingly, he also urges interested readers to join him and his team.
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Jan Leike and others leave OpenAI
Leike’s move follows a series of apparent departures from OpenAI. Just last week, policy researcher Gretchen Krueger announced her resignation and expressed similar concerns about the direction of the company.
Mix and match speed of light
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In response to these exits, Microsoft-backed OpenAI established a security committee overseen by board members Bret Taylor, Sam Altman, Nicole Seligman and Adam D’Angelo. The company also revealed plans to test its “next cutting-edge model.”
Leike co-leads OpenAI’s Superalignment team with co-founder Ilya Sutskever. This team is responsible for ensuring that super-intelligent artificial intelligence systems remain controllable and safe. The team was disbanded following the resignations and its members reassigned to core research roles.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees and executives and recently received a $4 billion investment from Amazon. Leike’s new employer positions itself as more security-focused than its competitors and uses Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure to develop its large language models.
