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OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving the company to join Anthropic, the Amazon (AMZN)-backed AI startup that developed the extensive language model Claude to rival ChatGPT.
“This choice is a result of my desire to deepen my interest in the adaptation of artificial intelligence and start a new chapter in my career where I can return to practical technical work” – Schulman he said on social media platform X. “I decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives.”
Schulman’s departure comes less than three months after Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI disbanded its Superalignment team, which was working to give humans the ability to control superintelligence, a future AI system significantly smarter than humans.
The team’s leaders, Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI’s other co-founder) and Jan Leike, left the company this year. Sutskever started a recent company, and Leike works at Anthropic.
After Leike left OpenAI, Schulman took over as head of the company’s training team, which fine-tunes models implemented in ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. “To be clear, I’m not leaving because of the lack of support for matching research at OpenAI,” Schulman explained.
With Schulman gone, only three of OpenAI’s 11 co-founders remain: CEO Sam Altman, CEO Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba. Brockman he said will take sabbatical until the end of the year.
