Breaking: 3 OpenAI Leaders Leaving
It happened again.
3 leaders are leaving Open AI - and one for a direct competitor.
President Greg Brockman is going on extended leave, John Shulman to rival Anthropic (see below), and product leader Peter Deng is also out.
It sounds like a dumpster fire over there.
Elon Musk is also suing Sam Altman for "making a fool out of him.”
You can’t make this 💩 up! 🤦♂️
I shared the following note with my OpenAI colleagues today:
I've made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work. I've decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I'm most interested in. 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.
I joined OpenAI almost 9 years ago as part of the founding team after grad school. It's the first and only company where I've ever worked, other than an internship. It's also been quite a lot of fun. I'm grateful to Sam and Greg for recruiting me back at the beginning, and Mira and Bob for putting a lot of faith in me, bringing great opportunities and helping me successfully navigate various challenges. I'm proud of what we've all achieved together at OpenAI; building an unusual and unprecedented company with a public benefit mission.
I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me. Post-training is in good hands and has a deep bench of amazing talent. I get too much credit for ChatGPT -- Barret has done an incredible job building the team into the incredibly competent operation it is now, with Liam, Luke, and others. I've been heartened to see the alignment team coming together with some promising projects. With leadership from Mia, Boaz and others, I believe the team is in very capable hands.
I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to participate in such an important part of history and I'm proud of what we've achieved together. I'll still be rooting for you all, even while working elsewhere.
For some context, Shulman is a pioneer in Reinforcement learning.
Reinforcement Learning is a machine learning (ML) technique that trains software to make decisions to achieve the most optimal results. It mimics the trial-and-error learning process that humans use to achieve their goals.
He is basically regarded as the father of ChatGPT. He is regarded a responsible for the human-like response of ChatGPT that blew everyone away - because of the contributions by the team he led at OpenAI.
This is one of the big reasons why ChatGPT remains so popular.
If you’re not familair with him, check out his recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel on Youtube:
It's a big loss for OpenAI and big gain for Anthropic.
The leaders in the AI space seem very unstable. Thoughts?
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