OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever leaves the company

On Tuesday evening, 14 May, OpenAI's Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever announced his resignation from the company. This comes six months after he participated in the coup that temporarily ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Jan Leike, a member of Sutzkever's AI security team, is also leaving with him.

Here's What We Know

Sutzkever has been with the company since its founding in 2015 and was widely recognised as one of the key engineers behind some of OpenAI's biggest technical breakthroughs. As a former OpenAI board member, he played a key role in firing Sam Altman as CEO in a shocking layoff last November.

A few days later, Sutzkever regretted his involvement in Altman's dismissal and signed an open letter along with 700 OpenAI employees demanding Altman's reinstatement, which he subsequently did. However, the episode briefly jeopardised the company's future, leaving scars among some OpenAI employees.

Sutzkever has stated that he has a project ahead of him that is very "meaningful" to him. It is currently unclear what that project is. Jan Leike, another OpenAI executive who worked with Sutzkever to secure the future of AI, also resigned on Tuesday.

Over the past six months, Sutzkever's status at OpenAI has remained unclear. When Altman returned to the company in late November 2023, he said he hoped to continue the working relationship and discussed how Sutzkever could continue his work at OpenAI. Altman has since declined to answer questions about Sutzkever's status with the company in several interviews.

Sutzkever was the only OpenAI member left in limbo - neither fired nor reassigned. This is Sutzkever's first tweet in five months and OpenAI's chief scientist has been absent from major events like Sora and the GPT-4 Omni this week.

Jakub Pachocki, a senior researcher on Sutzkever's team, will take over as OpenAI's chief scientist in the near future.

Source: @ilyasut