Ilya Sutskever leaves OpenAI, opening a new chapter in his career

Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s long-time founders and chief scientific officer, has left the company. This news was announced by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday evening.

“This is very sad for me; Ilya was one of the greatest minds of our generation, a trailblazer for our field, and a dear friend,” said Altman. It would not be the same without him. Although he had a meaningful personal project to pursue, I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to fulfilling the mission we set out to achieve. head together.”

Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways. This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less…

— Sam Altman (@sama) May 14, 2024

Sutskever’s replacement is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s research director. Pachocki joined the company in 2017 to lead research on OpenAI’s Dota team – the team that built an AI system capable of defeating Valve’s Dota 2 players. Pachocki then became research lead for reasoning and deep learning science before being promoted to director of research.

It is currently unclear whether Pachocki will also take on the role of head of OpenAI’s Superalignment team, which until now has been led by Sutskever and Jan Leike. According to The New York Times, Leike also resigned from OpenAI.

After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI.  The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the…

— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024

OpenAI founded the Super Tri Tuyen group in July to develop ways to direct, regulate and manage “superintelligent” AI systems – that is, theoretical systems with intelligence far surpassing that of humans. The Times reports that John Schulman, another co-founder of OpenAI, will move to a supervisory role.

Techlade said the Super Tri Tuyen team will be “more tightly integrated” into OpenAI’s overall research to “better achieve its goals.” That means the group in its current form may change in the future.

Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, wrote that Sutskever “played a key role in helping build the foundation for OpenAI to become what it is today.”

Following the launch of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s latest flagship generative artificial intelligence model, and a significant upgrade to the company’s viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, Sutskever’s departure in many ways has Closing a story that began last November.

A week before Thanksgiving, Sutskever and OpenAI Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mira Murati approached former OpenAI board members to express concerns about Altman’s behavior. The problem is believed to be due to disagreements over OpenAI’s direction; Sutskever is said to be increasingly frustrated by Altman’s rush to launch AI-powered products without paying attention to safety issues.

I have immense gratitude to Ilya for being my co-founder, my friend, and the officiant at my civil ceremony.

Together, we charted the path of what OpenAI would become today. When we started in late 2015, OpenAI was a non-profit with a mission to make AGI go well but without a… https://t.co/4HEm6EDtqb

— Greg Brockman (@gdb) May 14, 2024

The old board, including Sutskever, abruptly fired Altman without informing anyone — including much of OpenAI’s workforce. In a statement, the board said Altman had not been “consistently forthright” in his communications with board members.

The decision angered Microsoft and other OpenAI investors, put the company’s stock sale at risk, and prompted the majority of OpenAI employees — including Sutskever, in a notable reversal — to declare Dad will quit unless Altman is quickly reinstated.

Altman was eventually reinstated and most of the old board of directors resigned. According to The Times, Sutskever never returned to work after that; Pachocki has actually been serving as chief scientific officer since November.

Sutskever — who earned his doctorate in computer science from the University of Toronto, where he worked under Geoffrey Hinton, an AI expert — came to OpenAI in 2015 after leaving Google Brain, one of Google’s AI research departments. Sutskever is an accomplished figure in the field of AI, having contributed to one of the first modern computer vision systems, ImageNet, and DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI gaming system.

He has not revealed his future plans, but in the announcement shared that he still believes OpenAI will achieve the goal of building artificial general intelligence – a type of AI capable of performing all tasks like humans, safe and beneficial. Sutskever also revealed a meaningful upcoming personal project, details of which will be shared later. He expressed his honor to have worked with the OpenAI team and will miss everyone very much.