On Wednesday, it became known that John Shulman left his role at AI startup Anthropic, which is called OpenAI’s main competitor in the field of basic artificial intelligence models.
On Wednesday, it became known that John Shulman left his role at AI startup Anthropic, which is called OpenAI’s main competitor in the field of basic artificial intelligence models.
«We are sad to see John leave, but fully support his decision to pursue new opportunities and wish him all the best,» Reuters wrote, citing Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, who wrote in an emailed statement.
As we will recall, in August 2024, John Shulman, who founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and Ilya Satskever, announced that he was leaving OpenAI, where he had worked for almost 9 years. In his resignation letter, John Shulman wrote that he was going to start a new chapter in his career, where he would be able to return to practical technical work. «I have decided to achieve this goal at Anthropic,» the former OpenAI co-founder said at the time.
In a memo sent to then-ChatGPT-maker employees, he said he was joining Anthropic to deepen his focus on AI alignment — the process of managing human values and goals in large language models.
Anthropic was founded by brother and sister Dario and Daniela Amodei, former employees of OpenAI. They left the company in 2020 to launch their own AI startup that prioritized AI safety and responsible development. Claude is the company’s flagship language model and a direct competitor to ChatGPT. They are among at least 23 former OpenAI employees who have left the startup to start their own companies.
The startup’s annual revenue was about $875 million, and it sells access to its models directly and through third-party cloud services, including Amazon Web Services.
In early January, it became known that Anthropic was approaching a new deal to raise an additional $2 billion, which would increase the company’s market valuation to $60 billion. And this comes a few months after receiving $4 billion in funding from Amazon.
