OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced a move to rival company Anthropic, and President Greg Brockman decided to take an extended vacation to “rest and recharge” until the end of the year. Product manager Peter Deng also left the company some time ago – he joined OpenAI last year, and previously held similar positions at Meta✴, Uber and Airtable.
Image source: Mariia Shalabaieva / unsplash.com
«We are grateful for John’s contributions as a member of the OpenAI founding team and his passionate efforts in advancing consensus technologies. His passion and hard work have laid a strong foundation that will inspire and support future innovation in OpenAI and the broader field,” TechCrunch quoted an OpenAI spokesperson as saying about Shulman’s departure. Shulman himself explained his decision by his desire to get serious about AI alignment—developing measures to ensure that AI behaves as intended—and to switch to practical technical work. “I decided to do this at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and conduct research with people deeply involved in the topics that interest me most. I am confident that OpenAI and the departments in which I worked will continue to thrive without me,” the engineer explained.
Shulman began working at OpenAI shortly after receiving his doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. He played a key role in the development of ChatGPT, leading OpenAI’s reinforcement learning department—tuning generative AI models to execute user requests. Following the departure of AI safety specialist Jan Leike, who is now also at Anthropic, Shulman has become head of the AI consensus science department—and it’s unclear who will replace him in that role. There is an opinion that OpenAI neglects security measures regarding AI, but Shulman did not press charges. “The company’s leadership has been very committed to investing [in developing AI orchestration technologies]. “My decision is personal, based on what I want to do in the next stage of my career,” he said.
Now there are only three people left at OpenAI who stood at the origins of the company: CEO Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Wojciech Zaremba, head of the language and code generation division. “Thank you for everything you have done for OpenAI! You are a brilliant scientist, a deep thinker about products and society, and most importantly, a great friend to us all. We will miss you very much, and you will be proud of this place,” Sam Altman addressed Shulman.