OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has announced his decision to leave, leaving Sam Altman free to shape the company as he sees fit.
Sutskever is leaving OpenAI to work on a “personally meaningful” project. In his farewell message, the chief scientist expressed optimism about OpenAI’s ability to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the holy grail of technology.
Recall that Sutskever played a key role in the coup against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in November 2023. The organization’s board of directors fired Altman at the end of 2023 for his increasingly commercial focus and tendency to promote artificial intelligence developments without proper safeguards. Officially, the board of directors cited Altman’s lack of candor in his communications as the reason for the dismissal
This decision caused a complete uprising at OpenAI, with employees turning in en masse to resign. Ultimately, Altman was able to return to the CEO position, forcing the board to resign.
When the situation stabilized, Ilya Sutskever expressed remorse for his role in the coup, even promising to “reunite the company.” However, it is obvious that the awkwardness between Sutskever and Altman has remained, so Ilya’s departure is quite understandable.
It is worth noting that Sutskever’s resignation occurs against the backdrop of the release of a new model. Called GPT-4o, the new multimodal platform uses text, visual and audio prompts to offer greater convenience and utility. It can recognize speech and translate languages in real time, as well as perform character recognition tasks. Other benefits include a 128K context window and a 50 percent reduction in operating costs.