OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist departs AI firm

Illya Sutskever said he’s leaving OpenAI for a “personally meaningful” project, and research director Jakub Pachocki is now taking over the role.

Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist who helped briefly oust CEO Sam Altman last year, is leaving the artificial intelligence firm.

“After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI,” Sutskever wrote in a May 14 X post without explaining why. He added he was confident the firm would build an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is “safe and beneficial.”

Altman posted on X that Sutskever and OpenAI would “part ways” and the former chief scientist “has something personally meaningful he is going to go work on.”

OpenAI announced Jakub Pachocki as its new chief scientist. Pachocki has been the firm’s director of research since 2017 and led the development of its GPT-4 large language model.

Sutskever was part of an effort that successfully saw OpenAi’s board briefly push out Altman as CEO in November last year before he was later re-hired to the role after backlash from employees

“I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,“ wrote Sutskever in an X post last November.

Sutskever also co-founded OpenAI Global, LLC, the firm’s for-profit arm.

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