John Schulman (Twitter)
John Schulman, one of the co-founders of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, announced that he is leaving the company after nine years. The departure comes after months of turmoil at the top of the company. However, Schulman said he is leaving because he wishes to continue his work on AI. To that end, he is joining AI safety and research company Anthropic.
“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,” said John Schulman in a statement. “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.”
Schulman specified that he was not leaving OpenAI due to lack of support for alignment research.
Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
You can support us for as little as $1 via PayPal at [email protected].
Thank you.
“On the contrary,” he said, “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.”
This comment may have been prompted by recent personnel shakeups at the company.
His departure comes just a few months after Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist at Sam Altman’s OpenAI who grew up in Israel and co-founded the company, left the firm. The move comes just six months after the firm’s board tried and failed to oust Sam Altman from the company he founded. Altman returned to run the company just two days after his “firing.” Sutskever was rumored to have been forced out of the company.
John Schulman went on to say that he is “confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me. Post-training is in good hands and has a deep bench of amazing talent.”
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research and implementation organization based in the United States. It was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and several others. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all humanity.
John Schulman is a well-known figure in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly known for his work in reinforcement learning.
John Schulman’s research has significantly influenced the field of AI, with his work on algorithms like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) being widely adopted in the industry.
