What is John Schulman known for?
John Schulman is known as the "architect" of ChatGPT. He co-founded OpenAI in December 2015 and led the reinforcement learning team responsible for building the system.
Questions about John Schulman
Short answers, pulled from the story.
Who co-founded OpenAI with John Schulman?
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by eleven researchers in total. The co-chairs were Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The other co-founders were Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba.
Why did John Schulman leave OpenAI?
Schulman left OpenAI in August 2024 to join Anthropic. He stated the move would allow him to deepen his focus on AI alignment and return to more hands-on technical work. He later left Anthropic in February 2025 to join Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist.
What is John Schulman's educational background?
Schulman graduated from Caltech with a degree in physics in 2010. He earned a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, where his advisor was Pieter Abbeel.
What is John Schulman's role at Thinking Machines Lab?
John Schulman is chief scientist at Thinking Machines Lab, a position he announced in February 2025. He moved there after a period at Anthropic, which he had joined in August 2024 to focus on AI alignment research.
What award did John Schulman receive from UC Berkeley?
John Schulman received the Mark Bingham Award for Excellence in Achievement by Young Alumni from UC Berkeley in 2025. The award recognizes outstanding achievement by recent graduates of the university where he completed his doctorate.