John Schulman, Co-founder of OpenAI, has left Anthropic after five months. He was one of the leading architects of ChatGPT and had left OpenAI for its direct competitor Anthropic, claiming the decision stemmed from a desire to “deepen his focus on AI alignment and engage in more hands-on technical work,” in an X post.
“I’ve decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in. To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area. My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career,” he said.
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Anthropic’s chief science officer, Jared Kaplan, said that he was “sad to see John go,” but “fully support[s] his decision to pursue new opportunities.” Since then,reports have emerged of Schulman joining former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s startup.
Schulman once again took to X to announce that he has left Anthropic. “Confirming that I left Anthropic last week. Leaving wasn’t easy because I enjoyed the stimulating research environment and the kind and talented people I was working with, but I decided to go with another opportunity that I found extremely compelling. I’ll share more details in the coming weeks”.
So far, it is not known what his new role would be, and Murati–who was reportedly in talks to raise over $100 million for her company in October–has been rather secretive about the startup. However, it was also revealed that other OpenAI staff were also recruited, including Christian Gibson, who had been serving on OpenAI’s supercomputing team.