OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever officially leaves the company — he is best known for leading the infamous failed coup to oust Sam Altman from the CEO position.
Both Altman and Sutskever published posts announcing their departures.
«This is very sad for me: Ilya is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light in our industry, and a good friend. Without him, OpenAI would not be what it is today», — wrote Altman on X.
The position of OpenAI’s chief scientist will be held by Jakub Pachocki, who worked at the company as a research director. According to OpenAI’s press release, Pachocki «led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, as well as fundamental research in large-scale RL and deep learning optimization».
«I’m excited about what’s coming next — a project that is very important to me. I will share the details in due course», — wrote Sutskever in his statement to X.
The Verge also reportedThe company has announced that Jan Leike, who led the Superalignment Sutskever team, has left OpenAI. His duties will be taken over by John Schulman, another co-founder of the company who sided with Altman during the failed coup last year.
As a reminder, in November 2023, the board of OpenAIremoved Sam Altman from the position of CEOclaiming that «he had not been consistently forthright in his communications, hindering the board’s ability to fulfill its duties». Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a short time later thatAltman and his team will join the corporation to lead a new AI research unitand then Sam again surprisingly ended up as CEO at OpenAI.
Ilya Sutskever, a native of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, started his career at Google, where heeventually lured Elon Musk to OpenAI. He became a co-founder and chief scientist of the company, and Musk left OpenAI in 2018 (officially — due to a conflict of interest with Tesla, and rumored —because he was denied the position of manager) and began to actively criticize Altman.
The media reported that it was Sutskever who led the coup in OpenAI — although he later said that he regretted his actions and signed a letter calling for Altman’s return.