Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, announced his departure from the artificial intelligence startup a few months after OpenAI went through a leadership crisis involving co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.
“I am excited for what comes next — a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time,” Sutskever wrote in an X post on Tuesday.
He was hired by Elon Musk to work as the company’s research director when OpenAI was established in 2015. By then Sutskever was already well-known in the field from his work at the Google Brain lab and his work on neural networks at the University of Toronto.
OpenAI announced on its blog on Tuesday that Jakub Pachocki, the research director, will take Sutskever’s place.
With no further explanation, Dr. Sutskever, 38, said he was embarking on a new study.
Sutskever was a major player in the botched takeover attempt in November when he and other OpenAI board members removed co-founder Greg Brockman from the board and ousted Altman as CEO.
A lack of trust between the company’s CEO and its board, a non-profit organisation tasked with making sure AI is developed in a way that “benefits all of humanity,” led to Altman’s removal from the position.
Reacting to the resignation as sad news, Altman wrote on his X:
“Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways. 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. His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important.”
We earlier reported that OpenAI joined tech behemoths like Google and Apple in the battle to create a new type of talking digital assistant on Monday when it announced a new version of its ChatGPT chatbot that can understand and react to voice commands, photos, and videos.
