Point of View: OpenAI and the Changing Landscape of AI Research

John Schulman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI and a principal architect of the ChatGPT chatbot, has decided to move to the main competitor, Anthropic. Schulman, who will focus on research into alignment—ensuring that AI systems adhere to human values—joins a series of significant departures from OpenAI. Anthropic, a startup founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, is dedicated to prioritizing safety at the forefront of its work. Schulman’s decision comes shortly after the departure of Ilya Sutskever, another co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI, as well as other team members. Schulman emphasized in a letter to his colleagues that his move was not due to a lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI but rather a desire to focus more intensively on this field of study and to engage more deeply in technical work. Simultaneously, OpenAI President Greg Brockman announced on the social media platform X that he would be taking a break for the rest of the year. In his post, he highlighted that this would be his first vacation since co-founding OpenAI nine years ago. Despite the company’s rapid growth, achieving a valuation of $86 billion since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, OpenAI’s mission is far from complete. These departures follow a turbulent period for the San Francisco-based company. OpenAI faced criticism regarding the speed of its AI development and the direction of its research, culminating in a board crisis last November. During this crisis, Brockman and CEO Sam Altman were temporarily ousted, but returned within five days following a campaign by employees and investors. The directors who had voted for Altman’s removal were replaced with new ones, leaving Adam D'Angelo from Quora as the only remaining director. Adding to the upheaval, a lawsuit was filed on Monday by Elon Musk, who had once co-founded OpenAI. Musk accused the company and Altman of abandoning their original mission in favor of commercial interests, particularly their partnership with Microsoft. Several other executives have left OpenAI to pursue their own projects, some voicing critical opinions about the company's efforts towards responsible development and deployment of AI. Prominent departures such as Jan Leike and Andrej Karpathy highlight the shifts within the AI research landscape.