OpenAI co-founder John Schulman quits to join Amazon-backed rival Anthropic: 5 facts about him

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John Schulman, a co-founder of OpenAI, just announced that he has left the company to join rival Anthropic. He mentioned in a post on social media platform X 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. Additionally, OpenAI's President and co-founder Greg Brockman shared that he will be taking a sabbatical until the end of the year, as mentioned in a post on X.

This news was first reported by The Information, which also mentioned the departure of Peter Deng, a product manager who recently joined OpenAI. OpenAI has not yet responded to requests for comments from news outlets.

It's worth noting that OpenAI is facing significant personnel changes, with AI safety leader Aleksander Madry being reassigned to a different role in July, while another co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, left the company in May. Furthermore, Andrej Karpathy, another founding member, departed in February to start an AI-integrated education platform in July.

Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, who also left the company three years later, recently renewed his lawsuit against the company and CEO Sam Altman. He stated that the firm prioritises profits and commercial interests over the public good.

Here are 5 interesting facts about John Schulman:

1. John Schulman co-founded the software company OpenAI in December 2015.
2. He joined OpenAI just before completing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley.
3. At OpenAI, he led the reinforcement learning team that developed ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the company’s generative pre-trained (GPT) language models.
4. He initially joined Berkeley in the neuroscience program and did lab rotations.
5. After being inspired by Pieter Abbeel’s work on helicopter control and towel-folding robots, he switched to the EECS (electrical engineering and computer sciences) department.

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Inputs from Reuters