OpenAI Co-founder Schulman Joins Anthropic, Brockman Takes Extended Leave

Aug. 6, 2024

In a surprising turn of events, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman quit OpenAI and decided to join the rival AI lab, Anthropic. On the other hand, Greg Brockman, OpenAI president and one of the co-founders has gone on a “sabbatical” through the end of this year. First reported byThe Information, and officially confirmed by Schulman and Brockman on X, it seems OpenAI leadership is again going through some transition.

After Jan Leike resigned from OpenAI and joined Anthropic in May over a lack of compute for alignment research and safety concerns, John Schulman became the head of alignment research at the company. Schulman was also recently made a member of theOpenAI Safety Committee. In that context, the resignation seems to be particularly surprising.

That said, Schulman says, “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.” His decision to join Anthropic is “personal” and geared towards gaining “new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in.”

Greg Brockman, who is seen as a close confidant of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, says, “I’m taking a sabbatical through end of year. First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build.“

It must be noted thatIlya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist also recently left the company and started his new venture,Safe SuperintelligenceInc. With many founding members leaving OpenAI, only three of them are still with OpenAI — Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba.

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