Sam Altman, the Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, announced that Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder and chief scientist backed by Microsoft, will be departing from the US-based Artificial Intelligence company.
The artificial intelligence research and development startup, established in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others, is most recognized for ChatGPT. This chatbot, powered by generative AI, facilitates human-like conversations on an extensive array of subjects. Users can engage with it to obtain answers, ranging from debugging games to composing poems, emails, and essays, among other tasks.
Altman, in a post on X on Wednesday said, “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 said.
“His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important,” the OpenAI CEO posted.
Sutskever also took to X to tweet, “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.”
He went on to add, “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, 38, said announcing his decision to leave the company that he co-founded in the year 2015.
In November, the chief scientist of OpenAI, along with three other board members, ousted Sam Altman, before expressing regret for the decision. According to reports from NYT, during his time as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, Sutskever played a role in an AI breakthrough related to neural networks, a technology that has been crucial to the field’s advancement over the past decade. OpenAI announced in a blog post that Jakub Pachocki, the company’s director of research, is being elevated to the position of chief scientist.
“I am very confident he will lead us to make rapid and safe progress towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits everyone,” Altman posted.
As the Chief Scientist at OpenAI, Pachocki is leading the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five. He earned a PhD in theoretical computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. According to a report in the New York Times, the company is valued at over USD 80 billion. Additionally, on Tuesday, OpenAI introduced an updated version of its ChatGPT chatbot, capable of receiving and responding to voice commands, images, and videos.
The company stated that the new app, based on an Artificial Intelligence system called GPT-4, processes audio, images, and video much faster than previous iterations of the technology. It will be accessible on both smartphones and desktop computers. According to a report by the New York Times, this new app is part of a broader initiative to integrate conversational chatbots like ChatGPT with voice assistants such as Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. While Google is integrating its Gemini chatbot with the Google Assistant, Apple is developing a new version of Siri with enhanced conversational capabilities.