Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders of OpenAI and a leading figure in the artificial intelligence community, has announced his departure from the company. This transition was disclosed in an internal message from CEO Sam Altman, who expressed deep sadness over Sutskever’s decision.
“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,” Altman wrote. He highlighted Sutskever’s pivotal role in OpenAI’s achievements and noted that while Sutskever is moving on to a personally meaningful project, his contributions to OpenAI are indelible. “OpenAI would not be what it is without him.”
Sutskever also shared his thoughts on Twitter, stating, “After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. 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 under the leadership of [Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Mira Murati], and now, under the excellent research leadership of Jakub Pachocki. It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly.”
In conjunction with Sutskever’s departure, OpenAI has named Jakub Pachocki as the new Chief Scientist. Pachocki has been with OpenAI since 2017, previously serving as Director of Research. He has been instrumental in several of OpenAI’s most significant projects, including the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, as well as fundamental research in large-scale reinforcement learning and deep learning optimization. Pachocki holds a PhD in theoretical computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
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Altman expressed his confidence in Pachocki’s leadership, stating, “Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation; I am thrilled he is taking the baton here. He has run many of our most important projects, and I am very confident he will lead us to make rapid and safe progress towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits everyone.”
Wave of resignations?
Sutskever’s departure seems to have been a part of a broader wave of resignations at OpenAI. Following his announcement, the platform X has seen many posts from supposed employees sharing that they have also resigned from the company.
However, it seems that some posts can’t be verified if they are misrepresenting themselves and are just posting to create a bandwagon. Some users posted screenshots of their query to X’s AI chatbot Grok on the recent OpenAI employees who left the firm in the past days.
Some of those who expressed their resignation on the platform have mentioned their plans to pursue new ventures or join other significant initiatives in the AI field. Evan Morikawa, who describes himself as “[having] led [Engineering] at OpenAI”, said he’ll be joining colleagues on a brand new initiative that “will be necessary to fully realize AGI in the world.”
Other posts about resigning from OpenAI seem to be taking the development to a sarcastic level and it started to become a trend.
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