Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s longtime chief scientist and one of its co-founders, has left the company.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the news in a post on X Tuesday evening.
pic.twitter.com/qyPMIcvcsY
— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024
“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. “OpenAI would not be what it is without him. 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.”
Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, director of research at OpenAI. Pachocki joined in 2017 as a research lead on OpenAI’s Dota team — the team that built an AI system capable of defeating human players at Valve’s Dota 2 strategy game. Pachocki then became research lead at OpenAI’s reasoning and science of deep learning orgs before a promotion to principal of research.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Pachocki would also take over as head of OpenAI’s Superalignment team, which was until now Sutskever’s purview. OpenAI formed the Superalignment team in July to develop ways to steer, regulate and govern “superintelligent” AI systems — that is, theoretical systems with intelligence far exceeding that of humans. We’ve reached out to OpenAI for clarification.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, wrote on X that Sutskever “played a key role in helping build 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… https://t.co/4HEm6EDtqb
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) May 14, 2024