Key takeaways:
- OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving to join rival Anthropic. He is the third high-profile executive to resign from the company in recent months.
- Schulman said he is not leaving due to concerns about how OpenAI handles AI safety. In May, Jan Leike said his concerns about AI model safety was the reason for his exit.
OpenAI has lost another brilliant engineer.
John Schulman, a co-founder of OpenAI who co-led its post-training team, is leaving OpenAI to join Anthropic, a rival AI startup founded by former OpenAI engineers.
He is the third high-profile executive departing the company in recent months. Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist and co-founder, left in May and started his own AI research firm. Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s AI safety team, resigned in the same week. Leike’s concerns about OpenAI’s commitment to AI model safety triggered his exit. He later took a position with Anthropic.
But Schulman, who studied physics at Caltech and received his doctorate degree at UC Berkeley, said he was not leaving due to any concerns about AI model safety. “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 tweeted on X.
“I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me. Post-training is in good hands and has a deep bench of amazing talent,” Schulman continued.
Turmoil after Altman firing
Sutskever was the one who fired OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last November, at the behest of the board, of which he was a part. At the time, the board said Altman was not being “consistently candid.” After most of the employees signed a letter saying they will quit if Altman was not reinstated, the board relented. Altman was rehired after five days.
However, it was not entirely clear why he was fired. There was speculation that it was due to concerns about the fast pace of product rollouts at OpenAI, which could compromise the safety guardrails of its models. But it wasn’t until the resignation of Leike that it was clear AI safety concerns were a big issue.
After an investigation, Altman was cleared of any charges. He later changed and expanded the board to add more business-minded folks. The board currently has Bret Taylor, the co-CEO of Salesforce, as its chairman; Altman; Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo; Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone, who was commander of the U.S. Cyber Command and director of the NSA; former Sony President (America) Nicole Seligman, Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
