Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s longtime chief scientist and one of its co-founders, has left the company.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was announced the news in a post on X on Tuesday afternoon.
“This is very sad for me. Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light in our field, and a dear friend,” said Altman. “OpenAI wouldn’t be what it is without him. Although he has something personally meaningful to work on, I am forever grateful for what he has done here and committed to completing the mission we started together.”
Sutskever is replaced by Jakub Pachocki, director of research at OpenAI. Pachocki joined OpenAI’s Dota team in 2017 as head of research — the team that built an artificial intelligence system capable of beating human players in Valve’s Dota 2 strategy game. Pachocki then became OpenAI’s head of research in reasoning and science for deep learning organizations before being promoted to head of research.
It was not immediately clear whether Pachocki would also take over as head of OpenAI’s Superalignment team, which until now has been under the purview of Sutskever and Jan Leike. Leike has also resigned from OpenAIaccording to the New York Times.
OpenAI formed the Superalignment team in July to develop ways to guide, regulate and govern “superintelligent” AI systems — that is, theoretical systems with intelligence that far exceeds that of humans. The Times reports that John Schulman, another co-founder of OpenAI, will move into the role of supervisor.
TechCrunch understands that the Superalignment team will integrate “more deeply” into OpenAI’s research to “better achieve its goals.” This could mean that the team as it exists today could take a different form in the future.
Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, wrote in X that Sutzkever “was instrumental in building the foundation of what OpenAI has become today.”
Hot on the heels of the unveiling of OpenAI’s latest flagship AI model, GPT-4o, and major upgrades to the company’s viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, Sutskever’s departure in many ways closes a saga that began last November.
A week or so before Thanksgiving, Sutskever and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati approached members of OpenAI’s previous board of directors to express concerns about Altman’s behavior. The issue was disagreements over the direction of OpenAI, according to reports. Sutskever is said to have been frustrated by Altman’s rush to launch AI products at the expense of security work.
The old board, which included Sutskever, moved to abruptly fire Altman without notifying almost anyone—including most of OpenAI’s workforce. In a statement, the board said Altman had not been “consistently candid” in his communications with board members.
The decision angered Microsoft and OpenAI’s other investors, jeopardized the company’s stock sale, and led the majority of OpenAI’s employees — including Sutskever, in a remarkable reversal — to pledge to quit unless Altman was quickly reinstated.
Altman after all it was was restored and much of the old council resigned. Sutskever never returned to work after that, according to the Times. Pachocki has effectively served as chief scientist since November.
Sutskever — who earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto, where he worked under AI luminary Geoffrey Hinton — joined OpenAI in 2015 after leaving Google Brain, one of Google’s AI research divisions. Sutskever is highly successful in the field of artificial intelligence, having contributed to one of the first modern computer vision systems, ImageNet, and DeepMind’s game-playing AI system AlphaGo.
So what will he do now? Sutzkever isn’t ready to say. But in a statement to X, he said he is leaving OpenAI with the belief that the company will build artificial general intelligence — artificial intelligence capable of performing any task a human can — that is “safe and beneficial.”
“I’m excited about what’s next – a project that has a lot of personal meaning for me that I’ll share details about in due course,” added Sutskever. “It was an honor and a privilege to work together [at OpenAI]and I will miss them all very much.”
