John Schulman, one of OpenAI's co-founders, has left the company to join rival AI startup Anthropic.
The company also confirmed that OpenAI president Greg Brockman will take an extended leave through the end of the year to “rest and recharge” after nine years with the company.
Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year after leading products at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, also recently left the company, the company confirmed. Brockman and Deng’s departures were previously reported by The Information.
The spokesperson shared the following statement about Schulman: “As a founding team member of OpenAI, we appreciate John’s contributions and his dedicated work to advancing alignment research. His passion and hard work have built a strong foundation to inspire and support future innovation at OpenAI and the broader field.”
Schulman posted about the decision to X today, which he said was driven by a desire to deepen the focus on AI alignment (the science of getting AI to work as intended) and engage in more hands-on technical work.
“I decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and work with people who are deeply engaged in the topics I care most about,” Schulman said. “I am confident that OpenAI and the team I was a part of will continue to thrive without me.”
Schulman joined OpenAI shortly after earning his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley. He led OpenAI’s reinforcement learning organization, where he was instrumental in creating ChatGPT, an AI-based chatbot platform that fine-tunes generative AI models to follow human instructions.
After the departure of AI safety researcher Jan Leike (now at Anthropic), Schulman became the head of OpenAI’s alignment science efforts, also known as the “post-training” team. He was also a member of OpenAI’s recently formed safety committee. It’s unclear who will replace Schulman in that role.
Despite the controversy surrounding OpenAI, particularly around the company's approach and handling of AI safety research, Schulman said he wasn't leaving OpenAI because of a lack of support.
“Company leaders have been very committed to investing in (alignment research),” Schulman said. “My decision is personal and will depend on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.”
With Schulman's departure, only three of OpenAI's 11 founders remain: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba, who was in charge of language and code generation.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for OpenAI!” Altman wrote on X. “You’re a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about products and society, and most of all, a good friend to all of us. We’ll miss you terribly, and you’ll make this place proud.”
UPDATE: This article was originally published at 5:38 p.m. ET and has been updated as OpenAI confirms Brockman and Deng’s departures.
