Shake-Up in AI: OpenAI Co-Founder John Schulman Departs from Rival Anthropic
In the latest news, One of the OpenAI’s eleven co-founders and leading AI alignment researcher, John Schulman has left his role at Anthropic after five months of joining. He has led the reinforcement learning team that developed ChatGPT. Schulman’s great contribution to the project was applying reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to OpenAI’s language models. His future plans might include to walk on the footsteps of other OpenAI co-founders and form a new venture.
His departure was confirmed by Anthropic on Feb 5, Wednesday. In 2023, he explained: “The idea was to align our models with human preference — try to get them to actually listen to us and try to do what we want.” Since then, John has continued to focus on the similar agenda. In 2024 he made a surprising decision to leave OpenAI with fellow co-founders Jan Leike and Mira Muratti walking in his footsteps and leaving the company too.
After he left, only three of the original founders led language and code generation, having OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Brockman and Wojciech Zaremba in the team. John Schulman on his farewell post on X in August, 2024 announced the biggest transitions of his life:
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 to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in.
At that time, he intended to take up the role at Anthropic to “focus on AI alignment” and “return to hands-on technical work.” As far as Anthropic’s revenue is concerned, a major competitor to OpenAI hits about $875 million annually.
John’s new AI startup on the way?
After his sudden departure from Anthropic, Schulman itself hasn’t disclosed his future plans. One possibility is that his own AI startup just like the other co-founders including Ilya Sutskever, who founded Safe Superintelligence, Andrej Karpathy, who launched Eureka Labs, and Vicki Cheung, who helped found Gantry.
Anthropic’s chief science officer Jared Kaplan said in an emailed statement to Reuters: “We are sad to see John go but fully support his decision to pursue new opportunities.”
Among the field’s leading researchers, lab-hopping is common. From OpenAI to Anthropic and from 9 years to 5 months, John’s career is interesting. He isn’t the only former employee who found Anthropic its home but include other fellow OpenAI co-founders Jared Kaplan and Durk Kingman, the leading AI safety researcher Jan Leike, and Anthropics CEO and President Dario and Daniela Amodei. However, his time at Anthropic is short-lived. The eyes are on his next career move and its impact on AI technology and the world.
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