The co-founder and chief scientist of ChatGPT maker OpenAI is leaving the company months after helping lead an attempted coup against CEO Sam Altman, but later expressed regret over the failed revolt.
Ilya Satskeva, 38, will depart a day after the artificial intelligence giant unveiled a new AI model called GPT-4o that is capable of realistic voice conversations and can interact between text and images, according to OpenAI.
“OpenAI would not be where it is today without him,” Altman wrote about Sutskever in a blog post.
The 38-year-old tech genius is a former graduate student at the University of Toronto, a prominent figure in AI neural network research, and was part of a group that included Altman and Elon Musk who founded OpenAI in 2015.
OpenAI’s other top researcher, Jan Leike, has also left the company. OpenAI announced that Jakub Pachocki will be the company’s new chief scientist.
“After almost 10 years, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI,” Sutskever said in a post on X.
Sutskever said he is working on a new project, saying, “It has a very personal meaning to me and I will share more details in due course.”
Mr. Sutskever played a key role in Mr. Altman’s dramatic firing and rehiring last November. He worked with other board members, including Adam DeAngelo, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, to fire Altman. Mr. Altman was also a director, but he did not have enough support to reverse the decision.
A few days later, he reversed course, joining more than 500 employees who signed a letter demanding Altman’s reinstatement and expressing regret over Altman’s “participation in board actions.”
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, opposed Altman’s firing and resigned in protest.
A few days later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who had directed the company to invest billions of dollars in a joint partnership with OpenAI, announced that Altman and Brockman would form a new advanced AI research team. He said he welcomes him to join the company as a director.
Altman and Brockman eventually returned to the company and revamped its board of directors.
After Mr. Altman returned, Mr. Sutskever was removed from the board, leaving his position within the company unclear.
Sutskever has been a prominent researcher in the field of AI for many years.
Before founding OpenAI, he worked as a researcher at Google Brain and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, according to his personal website.
He began his career working with Jeffrey Hinton, one of the so-called “godfathers of AI” who left Google last year and warned that rapidly evolving technology poses risks to humanity.
Shortly after its release in late 2022, ChatGPT was said to be the fastest application in history to reach 100 million monthly active users.
But global traffic to ChatGPT websites has been on a roller coaster over the past year, and is finally returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb.
with post wire
