OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he “stalked” Ilya Sutskeva to persuade him to join the quest to build artificial general intelligence, which many others were hesitant about at the time. spoke.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, ousted co-founder Ilya Sutskeva in 2014, eventually leading the artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, which is now valued at about $157 billion. He reportedly persuaded them to participate in building what would become the foundation of the
Altman recalls that in the company’s early days, the pursuit of artificial general intelligence was “cancelable” and had potentially career-destroying consequences.
“You can’t overstate how fringe AGI was in 2014,” Altman said in an interview with Bloomberg. “People were afraid to talk to me because I said I wanted to start working on AGI.”
Although this idea has not yet been fully realized, AGI refers to a level of artificial intelligence that is comparable to the level of human understanding, perception, and cognitive ability. (Currently, OpenAI has not yet reached this level of complexity.)
When Altman was looking for a partner to create the AGI platform, Ilya Satskeva was repeatedly introduced. The soon-to-be Principal Scientist at OpenAI had contributed to major advances in AI with AlexNet, a computer program that essentially pioneered advances in the industry. This program was able to decipher objects more accurately than any non-human entity to date.
Mr. Altman said in a press conference that he “stalked” Mr. Sutskever, eventually catching him in a hallway and pitching him the idea. The two agreed to meet for dinner, planting the seeds for a structure for the former nonprofit.
The company continued to make progress. We reorganized our nonprofit organization into a for-profit business in 2019 and debuted the first version of ChatGPT in November 2022. There was internal speculation about the launch of Altman’s program, with some believing it was premature.
“I don’t often make decisions where I say, ‘Let’s do this,’ and this was one of them,” he told Bloomberg.
Tensions within the company came to a head in November 2023, when OpenAI’s board of directors voted to abruptly fire the CEO due to communication issues. OpenAI rehired Altman after many of the company’s employees threatened to quit and company president Greg Brockman resigned in protest.
Notably, Mr. Sutskever was one of the board members calling for Mr. Altman’s removal.
Mr. Sutskever never spoke publicly about his disagreements with Mr. Altman, but he ultimately left the organization in May 2024 to found an AI safety company, Safe Superintelligence. Just three months after founding, Sutskever and his company raised $1 billion in cash, valuing the fledgling startup at $3 billion.
