OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever leaves the startup at the center of the current artificial intelligence boom.
“After almost a decade, I made the decision to leave OpenAI,” Sutskever said in a post on X.
Sutskever played a key role in the dramatic firing and rehiring in November last year of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. At the time, Sutskever was on OpenAI’s board of directors and helped orchestrate Altman’s firing. Days later, he reversed course and signed a letter to employees demanding Altman’s return and expressing regret over his “participation in board actions.”
After Altman’s return, Sutskever was removed from the board of directors and his position in the company was left unclear. Sutskever has reportedly been absent from the company’s daily operations for several months.
“OpenAI wouldn’t be what it is without it,” Altman wrote in a message to the company, which OpenAI posted on its blog.
Sutskever posted that he was working on a new project “that is very meaningful to me personally and which I will share details of in due course.”
Jakub Pachocki will be the company’s new chief scientist, the company reported on its blog. He previously served as director of research at OpenAI and led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI makes the popular ChatGPT chatbot, which sparked a race among the world’s largest technology companies for dominance in the emerging field of generative AI.
Sutskever’s departure comes a day after the company said at an event on Monday that it would launch a new AI model called GPT-4o, capable of realistic voice conversations and interacting through text and images.
Shortly after its launch in late 2022, ChatGPT was considered the fastest app to reach 100 million monthly active users, reaching the mark in January 2023. However, global traffic to the ChatGPT website has been on a decline. rollercoaster over the past year and is only now returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb.
Sutskever has long been a leading researcher in the field of AI. Before founding OpenAI, he worked as a researcher at Google Brain and was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, according to his personal website. He began his career working with Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called “godfathers of AI.”