OpenAI co-founder quits, to join rival Anthropic; CEO Sam Altman responds

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joined OpenAI in December 2015, just before completing his PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley

John Schulman, a co-founder of OpenAI, announced his exit from the company on Tuesday (August 6). He is set to join OpenAI's rival Anthropic.

In a post on social media platform X, Schulman said that he is making this move "to deepen his focus on AI alignment and return to hands-on technical work in a new chapter of his career".

I shared the following note with my OpenAI colleagues today:

I've made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. 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. I've decided…

— John Schulman (@johnschulman2) August 6, 2024

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also commented on the post, showing his gratitude. He said, "Thank you for everything you've done for OpenAI!"

 

Additionally, OpenAI's president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, shared in a post on X that he will be taking a sabbatical until the end of the year. "I’m taking a sabbatical through the end of the year. First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI nine years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build," he said in a post.
 

Who is John Schulman?

Schulman joined OpenAI in December 2015, just before completing his PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. During his stint at OpenAI, Schulman led the reinforcement learning team that developed ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the company’s generative pre-trained (GPT) language models.

With Schulman’s departure, only three of OpenAI’s 11 original founders remain -- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba, lead of language and code generation.

OpenAI: High attrition rate

Another co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, left the company in May. Additionally, Andrej Karpathy, also a founding member, departed in February to start an AI-integrated education platform in July.

Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year after leading products at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, also exited some time ago. The most talked-about exit was of Elon Musk, also a co-founder of OpenAI, who has filed a lawsuit against the company and CEO Sam Altman. Musk has alleged that the firm prioritises profits and commercial interests over the public good.