OpenAI’s founding team started with 11 people, including Elon Musk. Now Musk is suing the company for allegedly going against its founding mission and several of OpenAI’s cofounders are stepping away from their roles.
Late Monday, OpenAI cofounder John Schulman announced on X that he would be leaving to join rival AI firm Anthropic. He specified that his decision was personal, and not based on lack of support for AI safety research.
“My decision is a personal one,” he wrote, adding later that he will “still be rooting” for the OpenAI team, “even while working elsewhere.”
Related: AI Is Standing Between You and Your Next Job — Here’s How to Get Your Application Into Human Hands.
Schulman’s departure overlaps with another OpenAI cofounder stepping back from the company. On Monday, OpenAI president Greg Brockman stated that he would be taking an extended sabbatical for the rest of the 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
Brockman, CEO Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba, a research and language team leader, are the only members of OpenAI’s 2015 founding team who remain at the company.
The rest, including former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, have left, with Sutskever founding his own Safe Superintelligence venture in June.
Related: OpenAI Resignations: How Do We Prevent AI From Going Rogue?
Peter Deng, OpenAI’s vice president of consumer product, also left OpenAI on Monday per The Information, though he wasn’t on the founding team.
OpenAI has faced controversy recently, with Jan Leike, its former safety leader who departed for Anthropic in May, accusing the company of prioritizing “shiny products” over safety. In the same month, Scarlett Johansson hired legal counsel after finding that ChatGPT’s voice sounded “eerily similar” to hers.
