OpenAI Loses Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever: Sam Altman Reacts on His Departure

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday announced that their Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever is leaving the AI company. Sutskever has been replaced by Research Director Jakub Pachocki at the company behind ChatGPT AI chatbot. “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 in a post on X social media platform.He further said that 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,” said Altman.Sutskever was part of the OpenAI founding team and played a key role in the dramatic ouster of Altman in November last year. Soon after, Sutskever said he regretted the move. Altman later returned to OpenAI as CEO after an intense drama, with Microsoft getting a non-voting observer seat on the company’s board.Sutskever is famous in the field of AI and also worked at the Google Brain lab.“Pachocki is going to be our new Chief Scientist. Pachocki is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation; I am thrilled he is taking the baton here,” Altman posted.

Sutskever's departure comes over five months after OpenAI went through a leadership crisis involving the firm's CEO Sam Altman - who was fired by the company's board in November last year. Reportedly, Sutskever had joined in the effort to fire Altman but later signed an employee letter demanding his return. Shortly after Altman returned to the ChatGPT maker company, the board that fired him from his role, including Ilya, was almost entirely replaced after a rebellion by employees. Ilya Sutskever, a Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist, co-founded OpenAI. He studied at the Open University of Israel between 2000 and 2002, following which he moved to to Canada with his family and attended the University of Toronto. In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. He is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper. Sutskever's other professional trajectory includes a brief postdoctoral stint with Andrew Ng at Stanford University, followed by a return to the University of Toronto to join DNNResearch, a venture stemming from Hinton's research group.