Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, has left the company. The former Google artificial intelligence researcher was one of four board members who voted in November to fire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, sparking days of chaos in which staff threatened to resign en masse and Altman was eventually reinstated.
Altman confirmed Sutskever’s departure on Tuesday in a post on social platform. In the months after Altman’s return to OpenAI, Sutskever had rarely made public appearances for the company. On Monday, OpenAI showed off a new version of ChatGPT capable of engaging in quick, emotionally tinged conversations. Sutskever was conspicuously absent from the event, broadcast from the company’s offices in San Francisco.
“OpenAI wouldn’t be what it is without him,” Altman wrote in his post about Sutskever’s departure. “I am happy to have been able to be around such a genuinely remarkable genius and someone so focused on achieving the best future for humanity for so long.”
Altman’s post announced that Jakub Pachocki, director of research at OpenAI, would be the company’s new chief scientist. Pachocki has been at OpenAI since 2017.
On your own publish in X, Sutskever acknowledged his departure and hinted at future plans. “After almost a decade, I made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I am confident that OpenAI will create an AGI that is safe and beneficial” under its current leadership team, he wrote. “I’m excited about what’s next – a project that has very personal meaning to me and which I will share details of in due course.”
Sutskever has not spoken publicly in detail about his role in Altman’s ouster last year, but after the CEO was reinstated he expressed regret. “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI,” he said. published in X in November. Sutskever has often spoken publicly about his belief that OpenAI was working to develop so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, and the need to do so safely.
Sutskever blazed a trail in machine learning from an early age, becoming a protégé of deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. With Hinton and fellow graduate student Alex Krizhevsky, he co-created an image recognition system called AlexNet that stunned the AI world with its accuracy and helped trigger a wave of investment in the then-unfashionable artificial neural network technique.
Sustskever later worked in AI research at Google, where he helped establish the modern era of neural network-based AI. In 2015, Altman invited him to dinner with Elon Musk and Greg Brockman to discuss the idea of starting a new artificial intelligence lab to challenge corporate dominance of the technology. Sutskever, Musk, Brockman and Altman became key founders of OpenAI, which was announced in December 2015. It later pivoted its model, created a for-profit arm and received huge investments from Microsoft and other backers. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreeing with the company’s strategy. The businessman filed a lawsuit against the company in March of this year alleging that he had abandoned his founding mission of developing super-powered AI to “benefit humanity” and was instead enriching Microsoft.
Sutskever’s departure leaves only one of the four OpenAI board members who voted in favor of Altman’s ouster with a position at the company. Adam D’Angelo, an early Facebook employee and CEO of the question-and-answer site Quora, was the only existing board member to remain as a director when Altman returned as CEO.
