OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is undergoing significant leadership changes with the recent departures of three key figures: co-founders John Schulman and Greg Brockman, and product manager Peter Deng.
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman has taken an extended leave of absence, alongside John Schulman, who has left to join Anthropic, and Peter Deng, highlighting ongoing leadership changes within the company.
“I’m taking a sabbatical through the end of year. First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago,” said Brockman, highlighting that the mission is far from complete; they still have a safe AGI to build.
Meanwhile, Schulman announced his intentions of joining Anthropic, stating, “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.”
Further, he clarified, saying “To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.”
It looks like Schulman left the company while remaining in their good books. Sam Altman thanked Schulman for his contributions to OpenAI, calling him “a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about product and society, and mostly, you are a great friend to all of us,” reminiscing about their first meeting in 2015, where Schulman laid out much of OpenAI’s initial strategy in just 15 minutes.
However, the reason for Deng leaving the company remains unknown. It is most likely that he’s planning to start his own AI venture, given his passion and experience in building products like ChatGPT.
This development follows the departure of former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who left to start his own AI company, Eureka Labs. Eureka Labs is an AI+Education company focused on creating an AI-native learning environment. The goal of Eureka Labs is to revolutionise education by integrating generative AI with traditional teaching methods.
Previously, Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI, also announced his resignation and launched a new company called Safe SuperIntelligence. This venture is dedicated to developing advanced and safe AI systems, with a strong emphasis on safety alongside capabilities. Sutskever's new company aims to create superintelligent AI systems that are both advanced and secure, while avoiding the distractions and pressures faced by larger AI firms.
Along with Sutsekver, Jan Leike, OpenAI’s head of alignment, also resigned and joined Anthropic. Leike announced he would continue working on the “super alignment mission”, focusing on scalable oversight, weak-to-strong generalisation, and automated alignment research.
The OpenAI mafia is just getting bigger and bigger with each passing day. The company certainly knows how to hire the best talent in the world, churning out folks so that big tech can eventually acquire them later on.
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