Key takeaways:
- OpenAI Chief Scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever is leaving the company. He was critical to the development of the company’s large language models including ChatGPT.
- He did not give a reason for leaving but hinted at a mysterious project.
- Sutskever was a former OpenAI board member who told CEO Sam Altman he had been fired.
OpenAI Chief Scientist and cofounder Ilya Sutskever has resigned, a day after the AI startup announced it was rolling out GPT-4o, its most powerful AI model yet − to everyone for free.
“After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI,” he announced in a post on X (Twitter). “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.”
Sutskever was instrumental in the development of OpenAI’s large language models including ChatGPT, which blew away users with its ability for creative writing that can exceed human ability when it was first launched in November 2022. He did not say where he was headed next, or why he was leaving, but hinted at a mysterious project.
“I am excited for what comes next – a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time,” he wrote.
Sutskever is leaving at a time when the AI race is heating up, as Google’s I/O conference unveiled a souped up, natively multimodal Gemini 1.5 Pro with a 2 million context window, the largest among AI models. (Roughly 100 tokens equal 75 words.)
Ousting Altman
Sutskever is widely known to be concerned about the safety of the strong AI systems being built. He was the one who informed OpenAI CEO and cofounder Sam Altman last November that the board was firing him. The publicly announced reason was that Altman was “inconsistently candid.”
But an investigation by an independent law firm later found that the board, of which Sutskever was a member, did not have sufficient grounds for the firing. The probe also found that the incident did not involve concerns about product safety or pace of development.
Altman’s farewell
“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 important,” Altman posted on X.
“OpenAI would not be what it is without him,” Altman continued. “I am happy that for so long I got to be close to such genuinely remarkable genius, and someone so focused on getting to the best future for humanity.”
OpenAI announced that Jakub Pachocki will be the new chief scientist. Pachocki had been the director of research overseeing the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, a computer program that can play as a team of five in Dota 2 to beat professional human gaming teams. Pachocki has a doctorate degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Pachocki will have big shoes to fill. OpenAI President and cofounder Greg Brockman wrote on X that “Ilya played a key role in helping build the foundations of what OpenAI has become today.” Not only did they start the company together in 2015, but Sutskever officiated Brockman’s wedding.
To his friend, Brockman said, “Thank you for everything.”
