Sutskever's job security has been a topic of speculation on social media since Altman was reinstated CEO last November.
Ilya Sutskever" width="970" height="647" data-caption='Sam Altman (L), US entrepreneur, investor, programmer, and founder and CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, and the company’s co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, speak together at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv on June 5, 2023. <span class="lazyload media-credit">JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images</span>'>
Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI for nearly a decade, is leaving the company six months after he led a failed ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year. Sutskever’s job security has been a topic of speculation on social media since Altman was reinstated CEO and overhauled its board just days after the dramatic coup in late November of 2023. Altman and Sutskever’s parting words seemed amicable enough. In an X post announcing Sutskever’s departure yesterday (May 14), Altman called him “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,” Altman added. In a shorter X post, Sutskever said “it was an honor and a privilege to have worked together” with Altman and that he “will miss everyone dearly.” Sutskever said he is moving onto a project that is “personally meaningful to him.” His chief scientist role will be filled by Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s head of research who led the development of the GPT-4 large language model.
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…
— Sam Altman (@sama) May 14, 2024
— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024
Sutskever, 37, is a computer scientist known for his contribution to the field of deep learning, a subset of A.I. He co-invented AlexNet, a convolutional neural network architecture, while studying for his doctoral degree at the University of Toronto under Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering academic widely regarded as “the Godfather of A.I.” Sutskever is a co-author of the AlphaGo paper published in 2016.
Sutskever was born in Russia and grew up in Israel, where he attended college before moving with his family to Canada. He received a college degree in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 2005 at age 18 or 19 and later pursued a master’s and Ph.D. in computer science.
Sutskever was the central figure of OpenAI’s failed coup against Altman last year. On Nov. 17, OpenAI’s four-person board fired Altman with little notice to the company’s management team, investors or Altman himself. In a message to OpenAI employees two days later, the board said their decision was “not about any singular incident” but because Altman has “lost the trust of the board of directors.” The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the board’s concerns was Altman’s involvement in two outside business endeavors while running OpenAI: a consumer hardware device he’d been building with Apple’s former design chief Jony Ive and an A.I. chip startup.
Amid strong employee pushback, OpenAI’s board hired back Altman just days later, and Sutskever posted on X saying he deeply regretted participating in the board’s actions. After Altman’s return, OpenAI formed a new board, comprised of existing member, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo, and two new members: former Twitter chairman Bret Taylor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Sutskever and the two other former directors, academics Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, were pushed out.
