OpenAI’s chief AI wizard Sutskever is leaving the company

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, has left the company, Wired reports, UNN writes.

Details

As indicated, the former Google artificial intelligence researcher was one of four board members who voted in November to fire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, triggering days of chaos as employees threatened to leave en masse and Altman was eventually reinstated

Altman confirmed Sutskever's departure in a post on the social media platform X on Tuesday. For several months after Altman returned to OpenAI, Sutskever rarely appeared in public on behalf of the company. On Monday, OpenAI demonstrated a new version of ChatGPT, which is capable of carrying on a fast-paced and emotionally charged conversation. Sutskever was conspicuously absent from the event, which was broadcast from the company's San Francisco office.

"Without him, OpenAI would not be what it is," Altman wrote in his post about Sutskever's departure. - "I'm happy to have had the privilege of being around such an outstanding genius and a man who is so focused on achieving a better future for humanity for so long.

Altman's announcement said that Jakub Paczocki, OpenAI's research director, would become the company's new chief scientist. Pachocki has been working at OpenAI since 2017.

In his post on X, Sutskever admitted that he had left and hinted at his plans for the future. "After almost ten years, I have decided to leave OpenAI. The company's trajectory has been remarkable, and I am confident that OpenAI will create an AGI that is both safe and useful," he wrote. - "I'm looking forward to what comes next, a project that is very personally meaningful to me, which I will share more about in due course.

Sutskever did not publicly elaborate on his role in Altman's dismissal last year, but expressed regret after the CEO was reinstated. "I deeply regret my part in the actions of the board. I never intended to harm OpenAI," he wrote on X in November. Sutskever has often spoken publicly about his belief that OpenAI is working to develop so-called general artificial intelligence, or AGI, and the need to do so safely.

Addendum

Sutskever paved the way for machine learning from an early age, becoming a protégé of deep learning pioneer Jeffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. Together with Hinton and fellow graduate student Alex Kryzewski, he created an image recognition system called AlexNet that stunned the artificial intelligence world with its accuracy and helped spark a flurry of investment in the then-fashionable artificial neural network technology.

Later, Sutskever worked on artificial intelligence research at Google, where he helped found the modern era of neural network-based artificial intelligence. In 2015, Altman invited him to a dinner with Elon Musk and Greg Brockman to discuss the idea of creating a new artificial intelligence lab that would challenge corporate dominance in technology. Sutskever, Musk, Brockman, and Altman became the key founders of OpenAI, which was announced in December 2015. The company later changed its model, creating a commercial division and receiving huge investments from Microsoft and other sponsors.

Musk left OpenAI in 2018 due to disagreement with the company's strategy. In March of this year, the entrepreneur filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming that it had abandoned its core mission of developing super-powerful artificial intelligence to "benefit humanity" and was instead enriching Microsoft.