John Schulman, OpenAI co-founder and core leader, has left to join competitor Anthropic. He was previously responsible for fine-tuning API models for ChatGPT and OpenAI research and development.
Currently, only 3 of OpenAI's original 11 founders remain: CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba. Greg Brockman just announced an extended leave until the end of the year.
Schulman stated that his departure was for personal reasons, not because OpenAI doesn't prioritize alignment research. He will continue to focus on AI alignment issues at Anthropic.
With Schulman's departure, OpenAI's AI alignment work faces challenges. The super alignment team has already disbanded, and alignment research has been dispersed across departments. Jan Leike, the former head of the alignment team, has also joined Anthropic.
OpenAI has recently experienced significant personnel losses, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever and product manager Peter Deng. Some believe this is related to factors such as AI safety and commercialization.
Meanwhile, OpenAI faces substantial losses and is expected to seek additional funding. Elon Musk has also sued OpenAI again, accusing it of prioritizing profits over public interest.
The development of companies like Meta in the open-source AI field is also putting pressure on OpenAI. OpenAI currently faces multiple challenges, and changes in its core team have raised concerns about its future prospects.