Another notable former OpenAI researcher is making the switch to Anthropic. Diederik “Durk” Kingma, a co-founder of OpenAI, revealed today that he will be joining the competing company.
Kingma, who previously worked at Google, is well-known for co-authoring the pivotal paper “Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization.” His extensive knowledge will significantly enhance Anthropic’s expanding roster of AI experts.
Kingma has a remarkable career that bridges both academia and industry. He received his Ph.D. with honors from the University of Amsterdam in 2017, where he specialized in deep learning and generative models.
His influential work includes key developments such as Variational Autoencoders (VAE), the Adam optimizer, Glow, and Variational Diffusion Models.
Kingma’s transition is part of a trend of notable exits from OpenAI to Anthropic. This year, Anthropic also brought on board Jan Leike, who previously led safety at OpenAI, and co-founder John Schulman.
On social media, Kingma expressed, “Anthropic’s philosophy regarding AI development aligns closely with my own views. I’m eager to help further Anthropic’s mission of creating powerful AI systems in a responsible manner.”
Dario and Daniela Amodei, the founders of Anthropic, departed from OpenAI in 2019, citing differences over the company’s trajectory, especially regarding its growing partnership with Microsoft. Since then, they have positioned Anthropic as a safety-focused alternative in the AI landscape.
Kingma brings a wealth of experience, having held significant positions at leading tech companies. After co-founding OpenAI in 2015 and leading the algorithms team, he moved to Google Brain (which later merged with DeepMind) in 2018. There, he spearheaded multiple research initiatives centered around generative models for text, images, and video.
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