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Personnel changes continue at artificial intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI as co-founder John Schulman announced on August 5 that he has left the company for competitor Anthropic.
“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,” he wrote in a post on X.
In December 2015, Schulman started OpenAI right after graduate school, along with 12 other tech experts, researchers, and entrepreneurs. Since then, it had been the only company he ever worked for.
Starting this week, he has Anthropic to add to the list.
Anthropic is a public-benefit startup founded in 2021 by seven ex-employees of OpenAI. Schulman believes that transferring to the firm would enable him to gain new perspectives and perform research with people who share his interests.
However, he was quick to shut down any possible rumors against his former firm, saying his personal decision was solely based on how he wanted to proceed in the next phase of his career. “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.”
Recently, OpenAI has been experiencing numerous staff changes and resignations reportedly due to internal conflicts and safety concerns from both developers and users.
A couple of hours after Schulman disclosed his move, President and co-founder Greg Brockman also posted on X that he is taking a sabbatical through the end of the year.
AI safety leader Aleksander Madry started another role in July, too, leaving the preparedness team tasked to evaluate the artificial general intelligence readiness of OpenAI’s models. Chief Executive Sam Altman said executives Joaquin Quinonero Candela and Lilian Weng would take over the team in the meantime.
Further, product manager Peter Deng vacated his position after joining OpenAI last year. He was joined by another co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, who left in February and started Eureka Labs to bring AI assistants to education.
Following their footsteps, Ilya Sutskever resigned in May and later revealed his new firm, Safe Superintelligence, which is focused on creating a safe AI environment.
Amid this management scuffle, Elon Musk, who also co-founded and worked for OpenAI for three years before leaving in 2018, filed a new lawsuit against Altman and the company, alleging that it prioritizes profits over public safety.
