Who didn’t see this coming after he tried to get Sam Altman fired?
Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist who helped lead the infamous failed coup against Sam Altman and then later changed his mind, is officially leaving the company.
Both Altman and Sutskever have farewell posts on X:
Here’s Altman’s full post for posterity (or if you don’t have an X login to expand the whole thing):
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.
OpenAI would not be what it is without him. Although he has something personally meaningful he is going to go work on, I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together. I am happy that for so long I got to be close to such genuinely remarkable genius, and someone so focused on getting to the best future for humanity.
Jakub is going to be our new Chief Scientist. 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.
Jakub refers to Jakub Pachocki, the company’s Director of Research, according to an OpenAI press release. It says he’d been “spearheading the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, and fundamental research in large-scale RL and deep learning optimization.”
“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 said in his statement on X.
If you want to read more about all of OpenAI’s drama, here’s our StoryStream about the attempted coup.
https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
Sean Hollister
