A ChatGPT chat screen is seen on a smartphone in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., on Thursday, March 9, 2023. ChatGPT has made writing computer code and cheating on homework easier. Soon, it could make email scams easier. That's the warning from Darktrace Plc, a British cybersecurity company.
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OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said in a post on Monday that he is leaving the company. Microsoft– Backed and joined Anthropic, an AI startup funded by Amazon.
The move comes less than three months after OpenAI disbanded its Super Alignment team, which focused on trying to ensure that people could control AI systems that exceeded human ability at many tasks.
Schulman was a co-leader of OpenAI’s post-training team that refined AI models for the ChatGPT chatbot and a programming interface for external developers, according to his bio on his website. In June, OpenAI said Schulman, as head of alignment science, would join the safety and security committee that will advise the board. Schulman has only been at OpenAI since earning his doctorate in computer science in 2016 from the University of California, Berkeley.
“This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and begin a new chapter in my career where I can return to hands-on technical work,” Schulman wrote in a social media post.
He said he did not leave because of a lack of support for new work on the topic at OpenAI.
“On the contrary, the company’s leaders were very committed to investing in this area,” he added.
Both Yann Laiki, the head of the superalignment team, and co-founder Ilya Sutskever left the company this year. Laiki joined Anthropic, while Sutskever said he was helping to found a new company, Safe Super Intelligence.
Since OpenAI employees founded Anthropic in 2021, the two small San Francisco-based companies have been competing to come up with the most powerful generative AI models that can generate human-like text. Amazon, Google, and Meta have also developed large language models.
“I am so excited to be working together again!” Lakey wrote in response to Schulman’s message.
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post that Schulman's perspective informed the startup's early strategy.
Schulman and others chose to leave after the board fired Altman as CEO last November. Employees protested the decision, prompting Sutskever and two other board members, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, to resign. Altman was reappointed, and OpenAI’s board appointed additional members.
Toner said in an episode of the podcast that Altman gave the board incorrect information about “the small number of formal safety processes the company had in place.”
Law firm Wilmer Hill concluded in an independent review that the board had no concern for product safety when it fired Altman.
Last week, Altman told X that OpenAI is “working with the AI Safety Institute in the US on an agreement where we will provide early access to our next core model so we can work together to advance the science of AI assessments.” Altman said OpenAI remains committed to reserving 20% of its computing resources for safety initiatives.
Also on Monday, Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, announced that he would be taking a leave of absence from work for the rest of the year.
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