John Schulman
Co-founder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines Lab; OpenAI co-founder and first author of PPO and TRPO
- Cofounder and chief scientist, Thinking Machines Lab15
John Schulman is a co-founder and the chief scientist of Thinking Machines Lab. Before that, Schulman did research on the Alignment Science team at Anthropic, and earlier co-founded OpenAI, where Schulman led the creation of ChatGPT and from 2022 to 2024 co-led the post-training team. Schulman completed a PhD thesis on deep reinforcement learning in Pieter Abbeel's group at UC Berkeley and is first author of the Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) papers. At Thinking Machines, Schulman wrote the 2025 research post "LoRA Without Regret" in collaboration with colleagues.12435
Work
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
First author of the 2017 paper proposing a family of policy gradient methods that optimize a surrogate objective with multiple epochs of minibatch updates.3
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
First author, with Sergey Levine, Philipp Moritz, Michael I. Jordan and Pieter Abbeel, of the 2015 paper describing the TRPO algorithm for optimizing large nonlinear policies.4
LoRA Without Regret (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)Published research
Credited author, "in collaboration with others at Thinking Machines", of the September 2025 Connectionism post studying whether and when LoRA can match full fine-tuning.5
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
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