OpenAI co-founder and ChatGPT creator quits to join rival AI startup Anthropic

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman has left the generative AI he co-founded in 2015 for rival AI startup Anthropic, leaving just two original co-founders still working at the company.

Schulman, who led the creation of ChatGPT, announced in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that he is quitting OpenAI to work for generative AI startup Anthropic.

OpenAI Exodus: Is OpenAI in Trouble?

Schulman is the latest in a series of high-profile people to have left the company.  Last month, another OpenAI founding member, Andrej Karpathy, left the company to ‘work on personal projects.’

Besides Schulman leaving, OpenAI’s product manager Peter Deng quietly exited the company some time ago. In addition, OpenAI President Greg Brockman is on an extended leave, according to a report from The Information.

Schulman said he’s leaving OpenAI to focus on AI alignment and to ensure AI systems adhere to human ethics and interests. Schulman will be joining Anthropic to continue his research.

In his announcement on X (formerly Twitter), Schulman emphasized that his departure wasn’t due to a lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. Instead, it was a personal decision to shift his focus to the next phase of his career. Schulman played a key role in developing ChatGPT,  a hugely popular app after its 2022 launch.

“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 wrote on Monday night.

“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.”

I shared the following note with my OpenAI colleagues today:

I've made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. 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. I've decided…

— John Schulman (@johnschulman2) August 6, 2024

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed his gratitude for Schulman’s contributions, calling him a “brilliant researcher and deep thinker about product and society.”

This news follows several other high-profile exits from OpenAI. Last month, co-founder Greg Brockman announced a sabbatical to take a break before continuing his work on creating safe artificial general intelligence. Earlier in the year, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and product manager Peter Deng also left the company.

With these changes, only two of OpenAI’s eleven original founders, Sam Altman and Wojciech Zaremba, remain with the company.

Founded in 2015 by Sam Altman and Elon Musk as a non-profit research institution, OpenAI’s mission is to pave the way for safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, in 2020, it transitioned into a commercial entity, marking a significant shift in its trajectory. Despite internal disruptions in November, including Altman’s temporary departure and subsequent return, the company remains at the forefront of the burgeoning AI market, spurred by the successful launch of ChatGPT in 2022.