Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI, is leaving the startup at the center of today's artificial intelligence boom.
“After almost 10 years, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI,” Sutskever said in a post on X.
Sutskever played a key role in OpenAI's dramatic firing and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman last November. Sutskever was on OpenAI's board of directors at the time and helped orchestrate Altman's firing. A few days later, he reversed course and signed an employee letter calling for Mr. Altman's reinstatement and expressing his regret for Mr. Altman's “participation in board actions.”
After Mr. Altman returned, Mr. Sutskever was removed from the board, leaving his position within the company unclear. Sutskever has reportedly been absent from the company's day-to-day operations for several months.
“OpenAI would not be where it is today without him,” Altman wrote in a message to the company, which OpenAI posted on its blog.
Sutskever posted that he is working on a new project, saying, “This is a project that has very personal meaning for me, and I will share more details in due course.”
The company announced on its blog that Jakub Paciocchi will be the company's new chief scientist. He previously served as Director of Research at OpenAI, where he led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI created the popular ChatGPT chatbot, sparking a race among the world's largest technology companies for dominance in the emerging field of generative AI.
Sutskever's exit comes a day after the company announced at an event on Monday that it would release a new AI model called GPT-4o that is capable of realistic voice conversations and can interact between text and images.
Shortly after its release in late 2022, ChatGPT was said to be the fastest application in history to reach 100 million monthly active users, reaching that milestone in January 2023. However, global traffic to his website on ChatGPT has been increasing like a roller coaster over the past year, and only now has he reached that goal. According to analysis firm SimilarWeb, it has returned to its peak in May 2023.
Sutskever has been a prominent researcher in the field of AI for many years. Before founding OpenAI, he worked as a researcher at Google Brain and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, according to his personal website. He started his career working with Jeffrey Hinton, one of his so-called “godfathers of AI.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
