OpenAI Co-Founder Who Helped Lead Coup Against Altman Is Officially Leaving
Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist who played a major role in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to push chief executive Sam Altman out of the business last year, is now on the way out of the company himself.
The news was confirmed Tuesday both by Sutskever and the ChatGPT maker, which announced his departure in a blog post. “Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways,” Altman wrote in a message to the company, the post says. “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.”
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“His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important,” Altman’s message continued. “OpenAI would not be what it is without him.”
In November, Sutskever and three other board members voted to remove Altman from OpenAI—though it was Sutskever who told Altman he was being fired. The attempted coup fell apart within days with the majority of OpenAI’s staff threatening to resign, and the power struggle was conclusively resolved with Altman being reinstated.
“After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI,” Sutskever wrote in an X post Tuesday. “The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial,” he added, referring to artificial general intelligence—currently theoretical AI systems that can perform as well as or better than humans across a wide range of tasks.
Within hours of the news, another senior OpenAI researcher, Jan Leike, announced that he too was leaving with a laconic X post reading simply: “I resigned.”
Alongside Sutskever, Leike co-led the company’s “Superalignment” team, which was tasked with working out how to “steer and control” superintelligent AI systems in order to ensure they don’t go rogue and, in OpenAI’s words, “lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.”
Sutskever said in his post that he would be working on a “project that is very personally meaningful to me” but did not provide further details. Altman, in the blog post, also alluded to Sutskever having “something personally meaningful he is going to go work on” but nevertheless thanked him for the work he’d done at OpenAI.
“I am happy that for so long I got to be close to such genuinely remarkable genius, and someone so focused on getting to the best future for humanity,” he wrote.
Altman also announced that Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research who led the development of GPT-4, will become OpenAI’s new chief scientist.
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