Anthropic Lures OpenAI Co-Founder

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman has departed for rival AI startup Anthropic, while President Greg Brockman has embarked on an extended leave until the year’s end. 

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

“I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. This choice is driven by my desire to delve deeper into AI alignment and to start a new chapter in my career. I have decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and conduct research alongside people who are engaged in topics that interest me the most,” Schulman noted.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thanked him for his contributions to the company and highlighted his talent as a developer. 

Thank you for everything you’ve done for OpenAI! You are a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about product and society, and mostly, you are a great friend to all of us. We will miss you tremendously and make you proud of this place.

(I first met John in a cafe in Berkeley in…

— Sam Altman (@sama) August 6, 2024

Schulman was a key figure in OpenAI and the creation of ChatGPT, leading the team responsible for training the chatbot and fine-tuning generative models to perform human-directed tasks. Following Jan Leike’s departure, he led the work on post-training AI and was part of the newly formed safety committee. 

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI Vice President Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei, who was also one of the early employees at Altman’s startup. 

In November 2023, media reported on the OpenAI board’s desire to merge with Anthropic. 

With Schulman’s departure, only three of the 11 founders of the AI startup remain: Altman, Brockman, and Head of Language and Code Generation Wojciech Zaremba.

Brockman noted that he decided to take a vacation for the first time in nine years of work.

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.

— Greg Brockman (@gdb) August 6, 2024

Product manager Peter Deng, who joined OpenAI last year after stints at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, has also left. 

In May, co-founder Ilya Sutskever left the firm. He later established his own AI startup, Safe Superintelligence. 

Another co-founder of the company was Elon Musk. In August, he renewed a lawsuit against it, claiming that Altman and Brockman violated the founding agreement and prioritized commercial interests over public ones.

Significant leadership changes at OpenAI began after the scandal involving Altman’s dismissal.

He was soon reinstated, and changes occurred on the board of directors. 

Shortly before Sam Altman’s dismissal, OpenAI researchers warned management of a major AI breakthrough that “could threaten humanity.”