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Tencent Technology News on August 6, according to foreign media reports,OpenAICo-founder John Schulman is joining artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.

In a farewell letter to his OpenAI colleagues, Shulman said he chose to leave in order to focus more on AI alignment research and start a new career chapter at Anthropic.

He emphasized that his resignation was not due to OpenAI's lack of support for alignment research, but a personal career development choice. Schulman has worked at OpenAI for nearly nine years, made significant contributions to the company, and expressed confidence in the future development of the team.

In addition, Greg Brockman, the company's president and one of OpenAI's 11 co-founders, is currently enjoying an extended leave of absence.

Peter Deng, the product director who joined OpenAI last year and previously held product leadership positions at Meta Platforms, Uber, and Airtable, has also left.

Regarding John Schulman's departure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also responded on his personal social media platform, affirming everything Schulman has done for OpenAI and calling him a "deep thinker about products and society."

The recent, unreported leave and departures, while seemingly unrelated, reflect that OpenAI’s leadership has yet to fully stabilize since CEO Sam Altman was fired and rehired last November.

Brockman plays a crucial role in the company, translating major discoveries by AI researchers into large-scale AI models and products, such asChatGPTHe was also a key supporter of Altman, particularly during the latter's fight to return to the company. Brockman told employees that he planned to return to work after his long leave.

Schulman has driven the so-called post-training process within the company, which involves fine-tuning the large language models that power products like ChatGPT, and he has taken over the remaining members of the Super Alignment team, a safety team focused on preventing AI from causing social harm.

These personnel changes occur against the backdrop of rapid business growth, the potential for significant losses, and cyclical personnel turnover.

For example, OpenAI recently moved another head of safety, Aleksander Madry, to a different role. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder who was instrumental in the company’s breakthroughs, recently left to found a rival startup. Andrej Karpathy, another co-founder, left in February and later launched his own education startup. OpenAI also hired a chief financial officer and a chief product officer for the first time, and their additions may have had an impact on Peter Deng’s responsibilities.

OpenAI is currently in the process of transitioning from a nonprofit to a for-profit company similar to Anthropic, and is training its next flagship AI model. In addition, OpenAI recently launched a search engine and is developing an AI that aims to automate computer tasks for clients.

Appendix: John Schulman’s full post on Social Media X

Today, I shared the following with my colleagues at OpenAI:

I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. I made this choice because I want to further focus on AI coordination and start a new chapter in my career where I can get back to doing actual technical work. I have decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research with people who are deeply engaged in the topics that interest me most.

To be clear, I am not leaving OpenAI because of insufficient support for alignment research. On the contrary, company leadership has been very committed to investing in this area. My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.

I joined OpenAI as a member of the founding team almost 9 years ago right out of graduate school. It’s the first and only company I’ve ever worked for, outside of internships. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m grateful to Sam and Greg for recruiting me back at the beginning, and to Mira and Bob for believing in me, bringing me great opportunities, and helping me successfully navigate the challenges. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together at OpenAI: building an unusual, unprecedented company with a mission for the public good.

I have confidence that OpenAI and the team I'm involved with will continue to thrive without me. Post-training is in great hands, with an amazingly talented bench of depth. I've gotten so much praise for ChatGPT, and Barrett has done an incredible job building the team to undeniable capability.

I'm always excited to see the Alignment team come together and there are some promising projects. Under the leadership of Mia, Boaz and others, I'm sure the team will be in very capable hands.

I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be a part of such an important part of history, and I'm so proud of what we've accomplished together. I'll still be rooting for you, even if I work somewhere else.