Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI, is leaving the startup at the center of today’s artificial intelligence boom.
“OpenAI would not be what it is today without him,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a message to the company, which OpenAI posted on its blog.
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.
After almost 10 years, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory to date has been nothing short of miraculous. I am proud of OpenAI under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @mira Murati, and now…
— Ilya Satskeva (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024
The company announced on its blog that Jakub Paciocchi will be the company’s new chief scientist.
Mr. Pachocki previously served as Director of Research at OpenAI, where he led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five.
“After almost 10 years, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI,” Sutskever said in a post on X.
“I’m working on a new project that has very personal meaning to me,” Sutskever wrote in a post, with more details to come.
Mr. Sutskever played a key role in Mr. Altman’s dramatic firing and rehiring 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 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’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. But global traffic to ChatGPT websites has been on a roller coaster over the past year, and is finally returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb.
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 began his career working with Jeffrey Hinton, one of the so-called “godfathers of AI.”
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