OpenAI Co-founders Brockman and Schulman Leaving Company

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - AI company, OpenAI is now starting to be abandoned by its co-founders. One of the co-founders, John Schulman recently announced that he had left the company that created ChatGPT. He chose to join its competitor, Anthropic.

Schulman announced his decision via the X platform, formerly known as Twitter. He stated that he chose to leave OpenAI because he intended to deepen his focus on AI alignment and get involved in more technical work.

"I decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research with people who are deeply involved in the topics I care about most," said Schulman, quoted from TechCrunch, Thursday, August 8, 2024.

Schulman joined OpenAI shortly after completing his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. He played an important role in creating the ChatGPT chatbot platform. Schulman leads OpenAI's reinforcement training team that refines generative AI models to follow human instructions.

Despite the controversy surrounding OpenAI, particularly over the company’s approach to AI safety research, Schulman said he did not leave OpenAI due to a lack of support. “I am confident that OpenAI and the team I am a part of will continue to thrive without me,” he said.

Greg Brockman Also Leaves OpenAI

After Schulman left, OpenAI President and Co-Founder Greg Brockman also announced that he would be taking a sabbatical until the end of the year after nearly a decade at the company. He revealed this as stated in a post on X on Monday night.

"I'm taking a sabbatical until the end of the year. The first time I've had a relaxing time since I founded OpenAI 9 years ago. This mission is far from over; we still have safe AGI to build," he wrote on the X account @gdb on Sunday, August 6, 2024, quoted from Reuters.

Previously, Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year after leading products at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, had also left the company some time ago. News of Brockman and Deng's resignations was first reported by The Information.

This change comes amid significant personnel changes at OpenAI, where Aleksander Madry, the company's AI safety leader, was moved to another role in July.

The Verge report, on Thursday, July 20, 2024, also stated that one of the founders of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, officially left his startup and built a new startup in the same field. Sutskever left the company in May.

According to The Verge, Sutskever had problems with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year. He tried to replace Altman but was unsuccessful. In May 2024, Sutskever started his new project and decided to leave OpenAI.

Previously, in February, Andrej Karpathy, who was also a founding member of OpenAI, left the company and in July started an AI-integrated education platform.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and co-founder of OpenAI, is stepping down three years after the company was founded. On Monday, August 5, 2024, Musk revived his criticism of OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, accusing the company of prioritizing profit and commercial interests over the public interest.

With Schulman's departure, only two of OpenAI's original 11 founders remain: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Wojciech Zaremba, the language and code generation leader.

RIZKI DEWI AYU | REUTERS | TECH CRUNCH | THE VERGE

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