OpenAI Co-founder Ilya Sutskever Departs To Work On ‘New Project’

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is leaving the AI pioneer, and has teased a new project that ‘personally meaningful’ to him.

The departure of Ilya Sutskever was confirmed in a blog post by CEO Sam Altman, who described Sutskever as “easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend.”

It comes months after Sutskever had played a role in the shock firing and rehiring of Sam Altman last November.

Ilya Sutskever departure

Sutskever had been on the board of directors that had fired Altman, and soon after he changed his mind and publicly tweeted that he “deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions”, and would do everything he could to reunite the company.

Altman was soon reinstated and Sutskever was removed from the new board of directors.

However there does not seem to any hard feelings between the two men, with Sutskever tweeting it was his decision to leave OpenAI.

“Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways,” wrote Sam Altman in the blog post. “This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important.”

“OpenAI would not be what it is without him,” Altman added. “Although he has something personally meaningful he is going to go work on, I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together. I am happy that for so long I got to be close to such genuinely remarkable genius, and someone so focused on getting to the best future for humanity.”

OpenAI is appointing Jakub Pachocki as the new Chief Scientist.

Pachocki has previously served as OpenAI’s director of research and led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five.

“Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation; I am thrilled he is taking the baton here,” wrote Altman. “He has run many of our most important projects, and I am very confident he will lead us to make rapid and safe progress towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits everyone.”

Sutskever has been a notable figure in the AI industry for year now.

Before cofounding OpenAI, he worked as a researcher at Google Brain, but began his career working with Dr Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called “godfathers of AI”.

New project

Meanwhile Ilya Sutskever tweeted that it had been a honour and a privilege to work at OpenAI, but he was going to working on a new project that “is very personally meaningful to me.”

After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the…

— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024

Sutskever’s exit comes a day after OpenAI said on Monday that it would release a new AI model called GPT-4o, that features an improved text, video and audio capabilities, as well as a desktop version of ChatGPT and an updated user interface.