OpenAI co-founder Sherman resigns to join competitor Anthropic

Intelligence Finance App learned that John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI, announced on Monday that he will be leaving the company to join Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup funded by Amazon. Less than three months ago, OpenAI disbanded the Super Alignment Team, which was dedicated to ensuring that artificial intelligence systems could surpass human capabilities in many tasks. Schulman stated that the decision to leave OpenAI was difficult, driven by his desire to delve deeper into AI alignment research and return to hands-on technical work, believing that he can gain new perspectives at Anthropic. "My decision is a personal one," Schulman said, emphasizing that his departure is not due to a lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. On the contrary, the company's leadership has been committed to investing in this field. Both the leader of the Super Alignment Team, Jan Leike, and the co-founder of the company, Ilya Sutskever, have left this year. Leike has joined Anthropic, while Sutskever stated that he is helping to establish a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. Since OpenAI employees founded Anthropic in 2021, these two young companies based in San Francisco have been competing to develop the most powerful generative AI models to produce human-like text. Amazon, Google, and Meta have also been developing large language models. Schulman's career has always been closely tied to artificial intelligence. From obtaining a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, to later joining OpenAI and leading the reinforcement learning project, he has been at the forefront of AI technology. Particularly at OpenAI, he led the fine-tuning of generative AI models like ChatGPT, enabling these models to better understand human instructions. Schulman's departure is part of a series of recent personnel changes at OpenAI. President Greg Brockman announced an extended leave after working for nine years, expected to last until the end of this year. In addition, product manager Peter Deng, who joined the team last year, has also left. Deng, who previously held key roles at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, made significant contributions to advancing OpenAI's product development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed gratitude to Schulman on X, calling him a "talented researcher with profound insights into products and society."