Kingma left OpenAI in 2018 to work as a research scientist at Google DeepMind.
Durk Kingma joins the OpenAI to Anthropic pipeline, becoming the latest co-founder to join the Claude chatbot maker.
Kingma, who has been working as a research scientist at Google’s Brain (which merged with DeepMind) since 2018, announced the move in a post on X.
“Anthropic’s approach to AI development resonates significantly with my own beliefs,” he said. “Looking forward to contributing to Anthropic’s mission of developing powerful AI systems responsibly.”
While he said he will be mostly working from the Netherlands, where he is based, Kingma did not give details about his new role.
Kingma has a PhD in machine learning from the University of Amsterdam and worked as a doctoral fellow at Google before founding OpenAI with 10 others. However, as of now, only three original OpenAI co-founders, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Wojciech Zaremba remain at the company.
After his stint at OpenAI ended, Kingma became an angel investor, investing in and advising AI start-ups, before returning to Google as a research scientist in large language models later that year.
Kingma becomes the latest Anthropic hire with a past at OpenAI. John Schulman, also an OpenAI co-founder, joined the rival company in early August.
In a post on X, Schulman said he left OpenAI to pursue “hands-on technical work”.
“I’ve decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in,” Schulman said.
Earlier this year, former OpenAI safety executive Jan Leike left the company to join Anthropic in a similar role.
Leike, who was part of a team that focused on the safety of future AI systems, expressed his disagreement with the company leadership’s priorities and said that these issues had reached a “breaking point”.
Founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees, the AI start-up Anthropic attempts to position itself as more safety-centred than OpenAI.
In June, it launched its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, which it claims operates at twice the speed of its predecessor and is ideal for complex tasks, boasting a “marked improvement” in grasping nuance, humour and writing high-quality content “with a natural, relatable tone”.
The company has gained a large amount of attention in a short space of time and is backed by various tech giants including Google and Amazon.
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