OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announces he is joining Anthropic

twitter.com

43 points·alphabetting··8 comments

> To be clear, I'm not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. On the contrary, company leaders have 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.

...so then why couldn't he do that at OpenAI?

EDIT: The Information reporting that 3 leaders are leaving including Schulman, which raises further questions.

Because he doesn't want to deal with sama

I think because he wants to "return to hands-on technical work", but that was difficult at OpenAI. As I understand, he is now managing alignment research at OpenAI. He is clarifying he can continue to do that, but he would like to do alignment research rather than managing one.

That's not a plausible explanation. sama knows how good Schulman is, of course he'd be glad to let him not manage anyone and continue his work.

OpenAI: Cofounders Greg Brockman, John Schulman, along with others, to leave

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862

Yeah.. why not make him a “Research Fellow” and give him a GPU cluster to play with and attract like minded researchers rather than become another departing key member of core team?

Information also reporting that Greg and others have left, or are about to leave. I wonder how long he's been gone, given he was still on Twitter promoting work until recently...

Translation:

I thank all the OpenAI investors who purchased my overvalued shares for $$$ as I dumped them straight in their faces and I will repeat the same strategy at Anthropic when they go public.

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