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Businesses AI

OpenAI's Chief Scientist and Co-Founder Is Leaving the Company (nytimes.com) 19

OpenAI's co-founder and Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, is leaving the company to work on "something personally meaningful," wrote CEO Sam Altman in a post on X. "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. [...] I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together." He will be replaced by OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachocki. Here's Altman's full X post announcing the departure: 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. His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important.

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. I am happy that for so long I got to be close to such genuinely remarkable genius, and someone so focused on getting to the best future for humanity.

Jakub is going to be our new Chief Scientist. Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation; I am thrilled he is taking the baton here. He has run many of our most important projects, and I am very confident he will lead us to make rapid and safe progress towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits everyone.
The New York Times notes that Ilya joined three other board members to force out Altman in a chaotic weekend last November. Ultimately, Altman returned as CEO five days later. Ilya said he regretted the move.
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OpenAI's Chief Scientist and Co-Founder Is Leaving the Company

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  • by oumuamua ( 6173784 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @06:42PM (#64472489)
    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 under the leadership of @sama , @gdb , @miramurati and now, under the excellent research leadership of @merettm . It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly. So long, and thanks for everything. 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.
    • It's official, he's the Yevginry Prigozhin of the tech world. He led an army against Altman, got cold feed, backed out and let Altman stay in power. At least in the tech world his plane won't be blown up, Altman will settle for him to go off in obscurity.
      • by cowdung ( 702933 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @11:09PM (#64472903)

        Look.. Sam may be forgotten by history, but not Ilya. Ilya's name is on too many real AI research papers.
        The guy has 4 papers that together have over 100k citations.

        He's a member of the Toronto gang of AI researchers under Hinton. He won't be forgotten. He's one of the guys that triggered the Deep Learning revolution with the AlexNet paper, and the top guy under whom ChatGPT was developed. So, no, he won't be forgotten. Not by people who actually study this stuff.

        The press with oogle Sam Altman as if he invented something, but those in know will know who actually invented this stuff.

        • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @05:12AM (#64473293) Homepage

          Yeah. I've watched some of Ilya's talks; he's quite impressive. Altman just comes across as a VC tech bro who happened to get into the right field at the right time and has socially manipulated his way to the top.

          • Despite Altman's intrinsic superiority (as proven by the size of his compensation package O_O), we must remember that it was still necessary for nerds to work on this for decades until the technology was ready to be marketed. Altman is himself merely stamping on the faces of giants!

            Help them help you help them devalue human labor! We're all in this together!

        • Oh sure, he's an accomplished researcher, but that rarely translates into the kind of long-term fame you think might emerge. For example, who invented quantum mechanics? It's a muddled field of a dozen or so researchers only known to advanced scholars of physics. Why do we know Einstein? He made himself into a celebrity in his day and was featured in newspapers and media regularly, almost always very positively.

          Altman won that battle, he's now associated with AI, and has pushed out his rivals. Sure,

          • by cowdung ( 702933 )

            If I need a sales guy I'll hire Sam.

            If I need a scientist or a premiere AI researcher I'd hire Ilya.

            Ilya has a standing offer with any of the large AI companies of the world including: OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, Tesla..

            All he has to do is name a price and they'll hire him. For virtually any amount of money.

            • Ilya has a standing offer with any of the large AI companies of the world including: OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, Tesla..

              Well, we can scratch two of those (OpenAI and Microsoft) because MS invests in OpenAI, and Satya Nadella intervened to crush his attempted OpenAI coup. He just left OpenAI after hostilities with Sam, so that won't be an option.

              I can think of another story that has some parallels (and many differences): Steve Wozniak. He was a profound mind behind the personal computer revolution -- arguably at the caliber Ilya is in the AI world -- who grew dissatisfied with Apple and left a few years in. What did he

  • Becoming a billionaire faster then sticking with OpenAI?
  • utter horseshit (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @07:07PM (#64472521)

    "Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation..."

    What utter horseshit and astounding arrogance to even say such a thing. Who is this asshole that think he is qualified to judge?

    • ha ha... completely... but it's dramatic... and that sells in this instant news cycle... everything must be epic... history is being written as I type... see how dramatic it sounds now... said Sam the 7 trillion dollar man... umm... I need money? did I mention that recently?
      • Not to mention the colossal fraud involved with scraping 100,000 books (that we know of!) and who knows what else. Soylent Green AI is made of people!
    • by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @07:24PM (#64472547) Homepage Journal

      Well the word "greatest" is left undefined. Since we are in the domain of advert-speak, we can assume that anyone with an IQ above 50 qualifies. So this statement is probably true of both Ilya and Jakub. And me, too.

      Maybe even you!

    • Re:utter horseshit (Score:5, Informative)

      by cowdung ( 702933 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @11:03PM (#64472893)

      Ilya is one of the most prolific researchers in AI:

      - He studied under the GodFather of AI himself: Hinton
      - He's one of the authors of the famous AlexNet paper that brought about the Deep Learning revolution
      - Some of his famous papers with over 25k citations:
            "Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks"
              "Imagenet classification with Deep convolutional neural networks" (AlexNet paper)
              "Dropout: a simple way to prevent neural networks from overfitting"
              "Language models are few-shot learners"
      - He was also an author of the famous AlphaGo paper "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search"

      So yeah, he's very influential in the field. He was among the biggest brains of OpenAI. Sam is just the money guy.

      • by Rei ( 128717 )

        On articles about AI, we're normally awash in ignorant comments. Yours are a breath of fresh air, someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

        If Slashdot had follows, I'd be giving you one :)

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @07:18PM (#64472537)

    This is very sad to Sam Altman; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of their field, and a dear friend.

    (I figured I might as well complete the trifecta)

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