In a major setback, the American artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI has lost its Co-Founder, John Schulman. He said in a post on X that he would be leaving Microsoft-backed OpenAI for its rival and Amazon-backed company, Anthropic. This move to change companies came just three months after OpenAI shut down its super alignment team. The team focused on ensuring that people are able to control any AI system that is much more capable than humans in more than one way.
John Schulman was the co-leader of openAI’s post-training team for their generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT. In June 2024, OpenAI announced that Schulman would join a safety and security committee as head of alignment science and would provide advice to the board of directors. Schulman has only worked for the renowned artificial intelligence organization for a little over 8 years. He has worked in OpenAI since 2016, the year he completed his Ph.D in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
While addressing his departure, Schulman wrote on a social media post, “This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work. On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area.”
Other leaders of the super alignment team, Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever have also left OpenAI. Leike has joined rival company Anthropic, while Sutskever is helping to start a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc.
OpenAI has long been trying to safeguard the use of AI and other superintelligent systems. Only last week Sam Altman wrote on his X, “OpenAI has been working with the US AI Safety Institute on an agreement where we would provide early access to our next foundation model so that we can work together to push forward the science of AI evaluations.”
