John Schulman

John Schulman (born ) 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 Schulman had an interest in science and math from a young age. He enjoyed science fiction, especially the work of Isaac Asimov. In 2010, he graduated from Caltech with a degree in physics. He has a PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was advised by Pieter Abbeel. There, he led the reinforcement learning team that created ChatGPT. He has been referred to as the "architect" of ChatGPT. and its extension proximal policy optimization, were components of ChatGPT. In August 2024, Schulman announced he would be joining Anthropic. He stated his move was to allow him to deepen his focus on AI alignment and return to more hands-on technical work. In February 2025, he announced he was leaving to join Thinking Machines Lab, where he is chief scientist.

Awards and honors In 2025, Schulman received the Mark Bingham Award for Excellence in Achievement by Young Alumni from his alma mater, UC Berkeley.