Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI's co-founders and longtime OpenAI chief scientist, has left the company.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced This news was posted by X on Tuesday evening.
“This is very sad for me. Ilya is without a doubt one of the greatest minds of our generation, a leader in our field, and a dear friend,” Altman said. “Without him, OpenAI would not be what it is today. He has personally meaningful work to undertake, but I will forever be grateful to him for what he has done here.” I am deeply grateful to all of you and remain committed to completing the mission we started together.”
Sutskever will be replaced by Jakub Pachocki, research director at OpenAI. Pachocki joined OpenAI's Dota team as a principal investigator in 2017. This is the team that built an AI system that can defeat human players in Valve's Dota 2 strategy game. Pachocki then became head of research for OpenAI's deep learning organization's Inference and Science, and was later promoted to principal investigator.
It was not immediately clear whether Pachocki would also become head of OpenAI's Superalignment team, which previously was under Sutskever and Jan Leike. According to the New York Times, Reich also resigned from OpenAI.
OpenAI formed the Superalignment team in July to develop ways to operate, regulate, and manage “superintelligent” AI systems, theoretical systems with intelligence far exceeding human intelligence. The Times reports that another OpenAI co-founder, John Schulman, will move into an oversight role.
TechCrunch understands that the Superalignment team will be “deeper” integrated into OpenAI's overall research to “better achieve our objectives.” That means the current team could look different in the future.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman wrote in X that Sutskever “played a critical role in laying the foundation for what OpenAI is today.”
I have a huge debt of gratitude to Ilya, my co-founder, friend, and master of ceremonies for my civil ceremony.
Together, we charted the path for what OpenAI is today. When we founded him in late 2015, OpenAI was a non-profit organization with a mission to make his AGI work, but that mission was not… https://t.co/4HEm6EDtqb
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) May 14, 2024
Following the announcement of OpenAI's latest flagship generative AI model, GPT-4o, and a major upgrade to the company's viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, Sutskever's departure in many ways concludes a story that began last November. Become something.
About a week before Thanksgiving, Sutskever and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati contacted former members of OpenAI's board of directors to express concerns about Altman's actions. The issue was reportedly a disagreement over the direction of OpenAI. Sutskever is said to have grown frustrated with Altman's rush to launch AI-powered products at the expense of safety efforts.
The old board, including Sutskever, moved abruptly to fire Altman without notifying nearly anyone, including most of OpenAI's employees. The board said in a statement that Altman had not been “consistently candid” in his communications with board members.
The decision infuriated Microsoft and OpenAI's other investors, jeopardized the sale of the company's stock and, in a stunning reversal, forced the majority of OpenAI employees, including Mr. Sutskever, to leave unless Mr. Altman quickly returned. promised.
Mr. Altman was eventually reinstated, and much of the old board resigned. According to the Times, Mr. Sutskever never returned to work. Paciocchi has been the de facto principal investigator since November.
Sutskever earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto, worked for AI luminary Jeffrey Hinton, and joined OpenAI in 2015 after leaving Google Brain, one of Google's AI research divisions. did. Mr. Sutskever has made significant achievements in his field of AI, the first modern computer he contributed to ImageNet, one of his systems of vision, and DeepMind's gameplay AI system AlphaGo. .
So what will he do now? Sutskever won't say yet. However, in a statement on X, he said he is leaving OpenAI with the belief that the company will build “safe and useful” artificial general intelligence (AI that can accomplish any task a human can do).
After almost 10 years, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company's trajectory to date has been nothing short of miraculous, and I am confident that OpenAI will build a secure and profitable AGI under its next leadership. @Mr, @gdb, @miramurati And now below…
— Ilya Satskeva (@ilyast) May 14, 2024
“I'm looking forward to what happens next. This project has very personal meaning for me and I will share more details in due course,” added Sutskever. “It was an honor and honor to work together.” [at OpenAI]And I will be very lonely when you all leave. ”