OpenAI’s chief AI wizard, Ilya Sutskever, is leaving the company

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI, has left the company. The former Google AI researcher was one of four board members who voted in November to fired OpenAI CEO Sam Altmanactivated chaotic day that was seen Employees threatened to quit en masse And Altman was eventually reinstated.

Altman confirmed Sutskever’s departure on Tuesday post on social platform X. In the months following Altman’s return to OpenAI, Sutskever rarely appeared in public before the company. On Monday, OpenAI demonstrated one New version of ChatGPT capable of rapid, emotionally tinged conversation. Sutskever was conspicuously absent from the event, which was broadcast live from the company’s San Francisco offices.

“OpenAI wouldn’t be the same without him,” Altman wrote in a post about Sutskever’s departure. “I’m very happy to be around such people for a long time. [a] a truly remarkable genius and someone focused on achieving the best future for humanity.”

Altman’s post announced that Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research, will be the company’s new chief scientist. Pachocki has been with OpenAI since 2017.

All his post on X, Sutskever admitted his departure and hinted at his future plans. “After nearly a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory is nothing short of miraculous, and I am confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial” under its current leadership team, he wrote. “I’m very excited about what’s to come—a project that means a lot to me personally that I’ll share details about when the time is right.”

Sutskever has not publicly released details about his role in Altman’s firing last year, but after the CEO was reinstated, he expressed regret. “I deeply regret participating in the board’s activities. I never intended to harm OpenAI,” he said posted on X in November. Sutskever has often publicly expressed his belief that OpenAI is working to develop so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, and about the need to do so safely.

Sutskever was at the forefront of machine learning at an early age, becoming a student of a deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. With Hinton and his graduate school friends Alex Krizhevsky He co-created an image recognition system called AlexNet, which stunned the AI ​​world with its accuracy and helped create a wave of investment in neural network techniques. created at that time were outdated.

Sustskever later worked on AI research at Google, where he helped establish the modern era of neural network-based AI. In 2015 Altman invited him to dinner with Elon Musk and Greg Brockman to talk about the idea of ​​creating a new AI lab to challenge corporate dominance in technology. Sutskever, Musk, Brockman and Altman became the key founders of OpenAI, which was announced in December 2015. It later transformed its model, create a for-profit arm and received large investments from Microsoft and other backers. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreeing with the company’s strategy. Businessmen filed a lawsuit against the company in March this year announced it had abandoned its original mission of developing super-powerful AI to “benefit humanity” and instead enriched Microsoft.

Sutskever’s departure leaves only one four OpenAI board members who voted to fire Altman from a role at the company. Adam D’Angelo, an early Facebook employee and CEO of question-and-answer site Quora, is the only current board member to remain as a director when Altman returns as CEO .