Microsoft Battles Amazon! OpenAI Co-Founder Leaves Company to Join Competitor Anthropic, Clarifies Departure Reasons

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced his departure from the Microsoft-backed company to join AI startup Anthropic, supported by Amazon.

Schulman's Departure: Was Superalignment Team Disbanded?

Schulman's decision to leave came just three months after OpenAI dissolved its Superalignment team. The team focused on ensuring that humans can control AI systems that surpass human capabilities, assessing numerous potential "risks."

As a key figure at OpenAI, Schulman co-led the post-training team, which was responsible for fine-tuning the ChatGPT AI model and developing interfaces for third-party developers.

Schulman Clarifies: Wants to Focus on AI Alignment

In his statement, Schulman emphasized his desire to focus more on AI alignment and return to technical work. "This choice stems from my wish to deepen my focus on AI alignment and embark on a new chapter in my career," Schulman wrote. He clarified that his departure was not due to a lack of support from OpenAI and praised the company's commitment to AI alignment.

Note: AI alignment guides the behavior of AI systems to align with the interests and intended goals of the designers.

Leadership Changes at OpenAI: Dispersing Across the AI Industry

Schulman's departure follows other key leaders leaving OpenAI. The former co-leader of the Superalignment team also joined Anthropic, while co-founder Ilya Sutskever left to establish a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. These changes indicate that OpenAI is currently undergoing a period of transformation and restructuring.

Competition Between OpenAI and Anthropic

Since its founding by former OpenAI employees in 2021, Anthropic has been a strong competitor in the generative AI field. Both companies, based in San Francisco, are dedicated to developing the most advanced AI models capable of generating human-like text. They face competition from tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Meta, who are also advancing the development of large language models.

OpenAI's Commitment to AI Safety

Despite leadership turmoil, OpenAI remains committed to AI safety. Recently, co-founder Sam Altman announced an agreement with the U.S. AI Safety Institute to provide early access to the next-generation foundational models at OpenAI. This collaboration aims to advance the science of AI evaluation, with OpenAI allocating 20% of its computing resources to the safety initiative.