Heaptalk, Jakarta — One of OpenAI’s co-founders, John Schulman, announced his departure from the company to move to Anthropic on his X account (08/06).
Schulman conveyed that his choice stemmed from his desire to deepen his focus on AI alignment and start a career where he could return to hands-on technical work. Deciding to enter OpenAI’s rival startup, he sees that Anthropic provides opportunities to gain new perspectives and research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics he is most interested in.
“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. My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career,” Schulman explained.
A Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences
A spokesperson responded to Schulman’s exit:” We’re grateful for John’s contributions as a founding team member at OpenAI and his dedicated efforts in advancing alignment research. His passion and hard work have established a strong foundation that will inspire and support future innovations at OpenAI and the broader field,” TechCrunch quoted (08/06).
Schulman joined OpenAI nine years ago, shortly after completing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. He led OpenAI’s reinforcement training org, which fine-tunes generative AI models to follow human instructions, and played a pivotal role in creating the AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT.
“I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me. Post-training is in good hands and has a deep bench of amazing talent,” Schulman concluded in a note to his OpenAI colleagues.
