Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s longtime chief scientist and considered one of its co-founders, has left the corporate.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the news in a post on X on Tuesday evening.
“This may be very sad to me; Ilya is well considered one of the best minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a pricey friend,” Altman said. “OpenAI wouldn’t be what it’s without him. Although he has something personally meaningful he’s going to go work on, I’m endlessly grateful for what he did here and committed to ending the mission we began together.”
Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research. Pachocki joined in 2017 as a research lead on OpenAI’s Dota team — the team that built an AI system able to defeating human players at Valve’s Dota 2 strategy game. Pachocki then became research lead at OpenAI’s reasoning and science of deep learning orgs before being promoted to principal of research.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Pachocki would also take over as head of OpenAI’s Superalignment team, which was until now under the purview of Sutskever and Jan Leike. Leike has also resigned from OpenAI, per The Latest York Times.
OpenAI formed the Superalignment team in July to develop ways to steer, regulate and govern “superintelligent” AI systems — that’s, theoretical systems with intelligence far exceeding that of humans. The Times reports that John Schulman, one other OpenAI-co-founder, will move into the overseer role.
TechCrunch understands that the Superalignment team can be integrated “more deeply” across OpenAI’s research to “higher achieve its objectives.” That would mean the team because it exists today could take a distinct form in the longer term.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, wrote on X that Sutskever “played a key role in helping construct the foundations of what OpenAI has turn into today.”
Coming on the heels of the disclosing of OpenAI’s latest flagship generative AI model, GPT-4o, and major upgrades to the corporate’s viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, Sutskever’s departure in some ways caps off a saga that began last November.
Per week or so before Thanksgiving, Sutskever and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati approached members of OpenAI’s previous board of directors to precise concerns about Altman’s behavior. At issue was disagreements over OpenAI’s direction, reportedly; Sutskever is alleged to have grown frustrated by Altman’s rush to launch AI-powered products on the expense of labor on safety.
The old board, which included Sutskever, moved to abruptly fire Altman without notifying nearly anyone — including the majority of OpenAI’s workforce. In a press release, the board said that Altman had not been “consistently candid” in his communications with the board’s members.
The choice infuriated Microsoft and OpenAI’s other investors, put the corporate’s stock sale in danger and led to nearly all of OpenAI employees — including Sutskever, in a remarkable reversal — pledging to quit unless Altman was swiftly reinstated.
Altman eventually was reinstated, and far of the old board resigned. Sutskever never returned to work after that, in response to The Times; Pachocki has effectively served as chief scientist since November.
Sutskever — who earned his doctorate in computer science on the University of Toronto, where he worked under AI luminary Geoffrey Hinton — went to OpenAI in 2015 after leaving Google Brain, considered one of Google’s AI research divisions. Sutskever is immensely achieved in the sphere of AI, having contributed to considered one of the primary modern computer vision systems, ImageNet, and DeepMind’s game-playing AI system AlphaGo.
So what is going to he do now? Sutskever isn’t able to say. But in a press release on X, he said that he’s leaving OpenAI with the idea the corporate will construct artificial general intelligence — AI able to accomplishing any task a human can — that’s “each protected and useful.”
“I’m excited for what comes next — a project that may be very personally meaningful to me about which I’ll share details in due time,” Sutskever added. “It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together [at OpenAI], and I’ll miss everyone dearly.”
