OpenAI is barely a decade old, but nearly three-quarters of its founding team has left its top ranks since its inception.
On Monday, the company’s cofounder and head of its alignment science efforts, John Schulman, said he’d “made the difficult decision” to leave OpenAI for its rival 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,” Schulman wrote in an X post.
“To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI,” he added. “My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.”
OpenAI CEO Altman penned a thank-you post to Schulman on X shortly after, praising Schulman as a “brilliant researcher” and “deep thinker about products and society.”
“We’re grateful for John’s contributions as a founding team member at OpenAI and his dedicated efforts in advancing alignment research,” OpenAI said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Thank you for everything you’ve done for OpenAI! You are a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about product and society, and mostly, you are a great friend to all of us. We will miss you tremendously and make you proud of this place.
(I first met John in a cafe in Berkeley in…
— Sam Altman (@sama) August 6, 2024
This makes Schulman the eighth cofounder who has left OpenAI since its founding in 2015.
Only three of the original 11 founding members remain — Altman, language and code generation lead Wojciech Zaremba, and president Greg Brockman.
Brockman, notably, said on Monday that he will be “taking a sabbatical through the end of year.”
I’m taking a sabbatical through end of year. First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build.
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) August 6, 2024
Besides Schulman, OpenAI has seen multiple exits among its leadership ranks in recent months. In May, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever announced his resignation from the company.
Sutskever leaving OpenAI wasn’t a huge surprise, given that he’d worked with fellow board members to oust Altman as CEO in November. He started his own AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc., a month after resigning from OpenAI.
Sutskever’s departure coincided with other top-level exits, including his co-lead for OpenAI’s superalignment team, Jan Leike. Like Schulman, Leike is now working at Anthropic.
“I joined because I thought OpenAI would be the best place in the world to do this research,” Leike wrote on X in May. “But over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”
Disagreements over OpenAI’s approach toward innovation appear to be a key bugbear for some of its departed cofounders, and nowhere has that been clearer than with former board member Elon Musk.
Musk left the company’s board in 2018, citing a conflict of interest related to his work at Tesla. But Musk has since gone on the offensive, publicly criticizing and taking legal action against the company.
The mercurial billionaire first sued OpenAI in February, accusing Altman and the company of violating its nonprofit mission by partnering with Microsoft. Musk initially dropped the lawsuit in June, only to sue the company again on Monday.
“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it ‘Open’ AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” Musk wrote on X in February 2023. “Not what I intended at all.”
To be sure, not everyone has left OpenAI on such acrimonious terms.
In fact, quite a number of them left the company way before it struck gold with ChatGPT in 2022.
Roboticist Trevor Blackwell, software engineer Vicki Cheung, research scientist Durk Kingma, and research engineer Pamela Vagata left the company between 2016 and 2018.
Notably, cofounder Andrej Karpathy had two stints with OpenAI, the first from 2015 to 2017, and the second from 2023 to 2024. Karpathy spent the interim period from 2017 to 2022 at Musk’s Tesla, where he served as the EV giant’s senior director of AI.
“First of all nothing ‘happened’ and it’s not a result of any particular event, issue or drama (but please keep the conspiracy theories coming as they are highly entertaining :)),” Karpathy wrote on X in February after leaving OpenAI.
OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
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