Just days after announcing his departure from OpenAI, Jan Leike has joined rival Anthropic to continue his work ensuring the safe development of AI.
Along with co-founder Ilya Sutskever, Leike led OpenAI’s “superalignment team” responsible for addressing the existential threats AI may pose to humanity. After leaving OpenAI, Leike took to X to describe a company that was no longer focused on its founding mission of safe AI development, but was instead focused on commercializing the tech.
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In contrast, Anthropic was founded by OpenAI execs who also left the company because of the direction it was headed. In the wake of OpenAI’s recent issues and scandals, Anthropic has been positioning itself as a safer, more responsible alternative.
Leike said on X that he will continue his “superalignment” work at Anthropic:
I’m excited to join @AnthropicAI to continue the superalignment mission!
My new team will work on scalable oversight, weak-to-strong generalization, and automated alignment research.
If you’re interested in joining, my dms are open.
— Jan Leike (@janleike) | May 28, 2024
The news is a major coup for Anthropic and further condemnation of the path OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman are currently taking.