John Schulman
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John Schulman (born 1987 or 1988[1]) is an American artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of OpenAI. In August 2024, he announced he would be joining Anthropic. In February 2025, he announced he was leaving to join Thinking Machines Lab, where he is chief scientist.
Early life and education
[edit]Schulman had an interest in science and math from a young age. He enjoyed science fiction, especially the work of Isaac Asimov. When he was in eighth grade, he became deeply interested in the television program BattleBots, which featured combat between robots. In what he said was his first self-directed study, he read extensively in subject areas that would help him design a superior robot, but the robot he and his friends worked on never was built. He attended Great Neck South High School. He was a member of the US Physics Team in 2005.[2] In 2010, he graduated from Caltech with a degree in physics.[3] He has a PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was advised by Pieter Abbeel.[4][3]
Career
[edit]In December 2015, shortly before finishing his PhD, Schulman co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk as the co-chairs.[5] There he led the reinforcement learning team that created ChatGPT.[4]
In August 2024, Schulman announced he would be joining Anthropic.[6] He stated his move was to allow him to deepen his focus on AI alignment and return to more hands-on technical work.[7] In February 2025, he announced he was leaving to join Thinking Machines Lab, where he is chief scientist.[8]
Awards and honors
[edit]In 2025, Schulman received the Mark Bingham Award for Excellence in Achievement by Young Alumni.[9][10]
References
[edit]- ^ Bourzac, Katherine (June 27, 2018). "Pioneers: John Schulman". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved June 26, 2025.
- ^ "2004 Physics Olympics".
- ^ a b "Bios | SBRS 2013".
- ^ a b Manke, Kara (April 20, 2023). "ChatGPT architect, Berkeley alum John Schulman on his journey with AI". Berkeley News.
- ^ "Only 4 of OpenAI's 11 Founders Are Still With the Company—Where Are the Rest of Them?". Observer. 2024-07-12. Retrieved 2025-05-15.
- ^ Fried, Ina (May 28, 2024). "OpenAI announces new safety committee and successor to GPT-4". Axios.
- ^ "OpenAI co-founder John Schulman leaves ChatGPT maker for rival Anthropic". Reuters. August 6, 2024. Retrieved 2025-06-24.
- ^ Goldman, Sharon (February 6, 2025). "OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup after brief stint at Anthropic". Fortune.
- ^ "Ion Stoica and John Schulman recognized with UC Berkeley Achievement Awards". cdss.berkeley.edu.
- ^ "Mark Bingham Award for Excellence in Achievement by Young Alumni – Past Recipients | Berkeley Awards". awards.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2025-07-21.
