One of the founders of OpenAI, John Schulman, who is also a key creator of ChatGPT, has bid farewell to the most popular AI company and decided to move to its main rival, Anthropic. Schulman’s move continues the trend of departures of top executives from the company.
Schulman will work at Anthropic, a startup founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers, focusing on research to ensure that AI systems align with human values.
His departure followed that of Ilya Sutskever, another of the eleven founders of the company and its former chief scientist, as well as other members of the former team.
– This decision stems from my desire to deepen my focus on alignment with artificial intelligence and to start a new chapter in my career where I can return to practical technical work alongside people who are deeply engaged in the topics that interest me the most – Schulman wrote in a letter to colleagues on Monday.
– To be clear, I am not leaving due to a lack of support for research at OpenAI. On the contrary, the company leaders are very committed to investing in this area – he added.
On the same day that Schulman announced his departure, OpenAI’s president and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, announced on social media X that he would take the rest of the year off.
– I am taking a sabbatical through the end of the year to relax for the first time since co-founding OpenAI nine years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build – Brockman announced.
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Indeed, key people have been leaving the company for some time. The value of OpenAI has skyrocketed to $86 billion since the launch of ChatGPT, and since that first version, the company has launched a series of chatbots capable of performing increasingly complex tasks.
However, the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the unstoppable pace of research has not gone without criticism, and concerns quickly spilled over into a leadership crisis, leading to the ousting of Brockman and CEO Sam Altman in November.
It is worth noting that it did not last long, as they returned to their positions within five days due to public, employee, and investor pressure. Board members who voted to oust Altman for being ‘inconsistent’ and ‘not honest’ have since been removed, and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo is the only director who remained during this crisis.
Of course, this does not mean that the company’s problems have ended, and former employees have repeated their criticisms and concerns months after Altman and Brockman’s ousting.
Additionally, Elon Musk, who helped launch OpenAI but left the board in 2018 after a conflict with Altman, filed a lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI this week, claiming they abandoned their mission to contribute to humanity when they entered into a commercial partnership with Microsoft, which has invested about $13 billion in the company over the past five years.
The company was also criticized by Jan Leike, a prominent member of Sutskever’s “superalignment team” focused on safety, who left in May and criticized the company’s efforts, or lack thereof, to ensure the safe and responsible development and implementation of artificial intelligence. – In recent years, safety and development processes have been sidelined, and the focus has been on ‘shiny’ products – Leike, who is now also at Anthropic, stated on X. Andrej Karpathy, another co-founder of OpenAI, left in February to work on his own AI project.
