OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, has announced his departure from the company. Sutskever, who was one of the four board members who voted to remove CEO Sam Altman last November, revealed his decision to leave the organization.
After the tumultuous events of those weeks, during which Altman returned to the company and formed a new board, Sutskever had chosen to remain at OpenAI. However, in the months following Altman’s return, Sutskever had rarely appeared in the public eye for the company. He was notably absent from the recent in-house live stream event for the unveiling of GPT-40, held just a few days ago.
In announcing his departure, Sutskever stated that he would be leaving OpenAI and shared that he would return with a project that is personally significant to him, details of which he will disclose when the time is right. Although it remains uncertain where Sutskever’s return will take place or if he will embark on a new venture.
Altman referred to Sutskever as “one of the greatest minds of our generation” and expressed confidence that under the leadership of CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and CTO Mira Murati, OpenAI would continue to build safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI). Additionally, Jakub Pachocki, the company’s research director, was announced as the new chief scientist.
Throughout his education and career, Sutskever has been engaged in research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). He contributed to the establishment of the modern era of neural network-based AI during his time at Google, where he worked on AI research. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Greg Brockman.
