Durk Kingma, one of the lesser-known co-founders of OpenAI, today announced which will join Anthropic.
In a series of posts on
When contacted for comment, an Anthropic spokesperson pointed to Kingma’s posts.
“Anthropic’s approach to AI development resonates significantly with my own beliefs,” Kingma wrote. “[L]We look forward to contributing to Anthropic’s mission to responsibly develop powerful AI systems. I can’t wait to work with their talented team, including several great former OpenAI and Google colleagues, and take on the challenges ahead!
Kingma, who has a Ph.D. PhD in machine learning from the University of Amsterdam, he spent several years as a PhD fellow at Google before joining the founding team of OpenAI as a research scientist. At OpenAI, Kingma focused on basic research and led the algorithms team to develop techniques and methods primarily for generative AI models, including image generators (e.g. DALL-E 3) and large language models (e.g. ChatGPT).
In 2018, Kingma left to become an angel investor and part-time advisor to AI startups. He rejoined Google in July of that year and founded Google Brain, which became one of the company’s main AI R&D labs before merging with DeepMind in 2023.
The hiring of Kingma is another talent coup for Anthropic, which recruited former OpenAI security lead Jan Leike in May. The company made another splashy hire that same month, naming Instagram and Artifact co-founder Mike Krieger as its first chief product officer.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was once vice president of research at OpenAI and reportedly parted ways with the company after a disagreement over OpenAI’s roadmap, namely its growing commercial focus. Amodei brought along several former OpenAI employees to launch Anthropic, including former OpenAI policy lead Jack Clark.
Anthropic has often attempted to position itself as more security-focused than OpenAI.