John Schulman, one of the founders of OpenAI, quits to join rival Anthropic. Schulman had joined OpenAI in December 2015, just before his doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. He announced his exit on Tuesday, August 6, 2024. He is making the move ‘to deepen his focus on AI realignment and to resume technical work, thus opening a new chapter of his career’.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s cofounder, has announced his sabbatical till the end of the year. He intends to relax and would like to work for achieving AGI goal.

Schulman at OpenAI has led the team of reinforcement learning that developed ChatGPT powered by GPT-3, a language model.

After the departure of Schulman, only three of OpenAI’s eleven original founders remain in the company — Sam Altman, Brockman and Zaremba.

Ilaya Sutskever, another founder, left the company in May 2024. Andrej Karpathy, another founder left in February 2024.

The most notable early exit was that of Elon Musk on the ground that OpenAI is deviating from its public good priority to commercial priorities.

Peter Deng from Product Management area who joined in 2023 also exited this year.