In July of last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team That would prepare for the advent of a superintelligent artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and dominating its creators. Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI and one of the company’s co-founders, was named co-leader of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power.
Now OpenAI’s “super alignment team” no longer exists, the company confirms. This comes after the departure of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation from the other co-leader of the team. The group’s work will be absorbed into other OpenAI research efforts.
Sutskever’s departure made headlines because, although he helped CEO Sam Altman start OpenAI in 2015 and set the direction of the research that led to ChatGPT, he was also one of four board members who fired Altman in November. Altman was reinstated as CEO five chaotic days after a mass revolt by OpenAI staff and the negotiation of a deal that saw Sutskever and two other company directors leave the board.
Hours after Sutskever’s departure was announced on Tuesday, Jan Leike, the former DeepMind researcher who was the other co-leader of the super-alignment team, published in X that he had resigned.
Neither Sutskever nor Leike responded to requests for comment and did not publicly comment on why they left OpenAI. Sutskever offered support for the current OpenAI path in a post on X. “The company’s journey has been nothing short of miraculous, and I am confident that OpenAI will create AGI that is safe and beneficial” under its current leadership, he wrote.
The dissolution of OpenAI’s super-alignment team adds to recent evidence of a restructuring within the company in the wake of last November’s governance crisis. Two researchers on the team, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov, were fired for leaking company secrets, Information reported last month. Another member of the team, William Saunders, left OpenAI in February, according to a post on an internet forum in her name.
Two other OpenAI researchers working on AI policy and governance also appear to have recently left the company. Cullen O’Keefe left his position as political boundaries research leader in April, according to LinkedIn. Daniel Kokotajlo, an OpenAI researcher who has co-authored several papers on the dangers of more capable AI models, “left OpenAI due to loss of confidence that it would behave responsibly in the age of AGI,” according to a post on an internet forum in her name. None of the researchers who apparently left responded to requests for comment.
OpenAI declined to comment on the departures of Sutskever or other members of the super-alignment team, or the future of their work on long-term AI risks. Research into the risks associated with more powerful models will now be led by John Schulman, who co-leads the team responsible for fine-tuning AI models after training.