Ilya Sutskever, has left OpenAI.
Ilya was co-founder and longtime chief scientist.
He made the announcement via an X post on Tuesday.
“After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. “ he wrote.
After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati
Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI also broke the news in a post on X Tuesday evening.
“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,” Altman said.
“ I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together.” He added.
Jakub Pachocki, director of research at OpenAI will be replacing Sutskever.
Pachocki joined OpenAI in 2017 as a research lead on its Dota team.
He then became research lead at OpenAI’s reasoning and science of deep learning orgs.
After being research lead, he was promoted to principal of research.
Altman also confirmed Pachocki’s new role in his post.
“Jakub is going to be our new Chief Scientist.” he wrote .
Expressing confidence in the new Chief Scientist, Altman wrote;
“I am thrilled he is taking the baton here. 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.”
Although Sutskever said in his post that he was leaving to start a project that is “very personally meaningful” to him, some sources believe otherwise.
According to reports, Sutskever’s departure is an aftermath of the crisis that saw the abrupt removal of Altman in November last year.
The saga ended with Altman’s swift reinstatement and resignation of some board members.
According to The Times, Sutskever never returned to work after that, and Pachocki has effectively served as chief scientist since November.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, also wrote a thank you message on X describing Sutskever as a key role player in building the foundations of what OpenAI has become today.
I have immense gratitude to Ilya for being my co-founder, my friend, and the officiant at my civil ceremony. Together, we charted the path of what OpenAI would become today. When we started in late 2015, OpenAI was a non-profit with a mission to make AGI go well but without a… Show more
Ilya Sutskever
Ilya Sutskever holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Toronto, where he worked under AI luminary Geoffrey Hinton .
He came to OpenAI in 2015 after leaving Google Brian, one of Google’s AI research divisions.
Sutskever is immensely accomplished in the field of AI and has contributed to great innovative projects including:
- ImageNet, one of the first modern computer vision systems, and
- AlphaGo, DeepMind’s game-playing AI system.