Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI and a central figure at the company, said he is is going on leave until the end of the year. At the same time, researcher John Schulman is leaving for rival artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
Both men are OpenAI co-founders, and their moves mark a shift at the company following already significant management churn this year.
Peter Deng, a vice president of product, also left in recent months, a spokesperson said. And earlier this year, several members of the company’s safety teams exited. OpenAI has made key hires, too, recently adding a new chief financial officer and chief product officer.
The result is a startup that looks significantly different than it did a year ago, and from when it launched in 2015. With the absence of Brockman and Schulman, only two members of OpenAI’s original founding team remain: Wojciech Zaremba and Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman.
Brockman, who goes by “GDB” to many at the company, was a key ally of Altman when the CEO was briefly ousted last year. Brockman quit in protest after Altman was fired. In a post on X on Monday night, Brockman wrote that the leave would be his first chance to relax since the company’s founding.
Schulman, who was a research scientist at the company focused on training its AI models, said in a post on X on Monday that he would focus on safety at Anthropic, but that concerns around that issue didn’t drive his decision to quit.
“To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI,” he said, referring to the alignment of AI with humans’ interests. “On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area.”
In a statement, OpenAI said the team is “grateful” for Schulman’s work, including on its alignment research. “His passion and hard work have established a strong foundation that will inspire and support future innovations at OpenAI and the broader field,” a spokesperson said.
Schulman has been hailed as the architect of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular chatbot. But said he gets “too much credit” for the tool, and cited the work of the larger team there. In a post on X, Altman thanked Schulman for his work at the company, and called him a “brilliant researcher” and “deep thinker.”
At Anthropic, Schulman will join another former OpenAI researcher, Jan Leike, who also left OpenAI to work on AI safety. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees.
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