John Schulman is co-founder and chief scientist at Thinking Machines Lab. He co-founded OpenAI, where his reinforcement-learning research helped shape ChatGPT, and later worked on alignment at Anthropic. His work spans reinforcement learning, robot learning and methods for improving AI behavior. He earned a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley in 2016, advised by Pieter Abbeel, after graduating from Caltech with a physics degree in 2010.