OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever is parting ways with ChatGPT creator Altman
OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is leaving the startup at the center of the current artificial intelligence boom.
“OpenAI wouldn’t be what it is without him,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a message to the company, which OpenAI posted on its blog.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI makes the popular ChatGPT chatbot, which sparked a race among the world’s largest tech companies for dominance in the emerging generative AI field.
Jakub Pachocki will be the company’s new chief scientist, the company said on its blog.
Pachocki was previously research director of OpenAI and led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five.
“After almost ten years, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI,” Sutskever said in a post on X.
Sutskever said he is working on a new project “that is very personally meaningful to me, about which I will share details in due course.”
Sutskever played a key role in the dramatic dismissal and reappointment of Altman last November. Sutskever was on OpenAI’s board at the time and helped orchestrate Altman’s firing.
Days later, he reversed course, signing an employee letter demanding Altman’s return and expressing regret for his “participation in the board’s actions.”
After Altman returned, Sutskever was removed from the board and his position at the company became unclear.
Sutskever’s departure comes a day after the company said at an event on Monday that it would release a new AI model called GPT-4o, capable of realistic voice conversations and interaction between texts and images.
Shortly after its launch in late 2022, ChatGPT was dubbed the fastest application ever to reach 100 million monthly active users. However, global traffic to ChatGPT’s website has been on a rollercoaster ride over the past year and is only now returning to its peak in May 2023, according to analytics firm Andereweb.
Sutskever has long been a leading researcher in the field of AI. Before founding OpenAI, he worked as a researcher at Google Brain and was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, according to his personal website. He started his career working for Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called “godfathers of AI”.
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First print: May 15, 2024 | 9:33 am IST