Person
John Schulman
John Schulman is an AI researcher and a co-founder of OpenAI, known for foundational work on reinforcement learning — including the widely used PPO algorithm — and on the reinforcement learning from human feedback that made ChatGPT usable as an assistant. He was a central figure in the team behind ChatGPT's 2022 launch. In 2024 he left OpenAI, and in early 2025 he joined Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, as its chief research officer — part of a broader movement of senior OpenAI researchers leaving to start or join new labs.
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- Ideas & essays 1
- Safety & alignment 1
- Labs & people 1
- Models & capabilities 1
- Culture & impact 1
Over 40 researchers across OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind publish joint chain-of-thought monitorability paper
The paper argued that a safety technique available today, reading a model's reasoning traces, could vanish under training pressure and urged labs to track and preserve it.
Ideas & essays · Safety & alignment
Thinking Machines Lab launches
The founding team of roughly 30 researchers, drawn heavily from OpenAI, had no public product and disclosed no funding figure at launch.
Labs & people
OpenAI launches ChatGPT
A free web interface to an existing GPT-3.5 model, reported by one analysis to have reached 100 million monthly users within two months.
Models & capabilities · Culture & impact
Also mentioned in 1 entry
Referenced in passing — John Schulman isn't the main subject of these.