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.
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.
Ilya Sutskever posted on X (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Ilya Sutskever posted on X (Score:2)
Re: Ilya Sutskever posted on X (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: Ilya Sutskever posted on X (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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!
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Altman won that battle, he's now associated with AI, and has pushed out his rivals. Sure,
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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.
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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
"something personally meaningful" (Score:2)
utter horseshit (Score:4, Interesting)
"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?
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Re:utter horseshit (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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.
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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 :)
From what I understand (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re: He was fired. (Score:2)
Non competes were already banned in California, where OpenAI is headquartered. The federal rule from the FTC would have zero impact on this guy's decisions.
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He was fired because of the blowback for everything that happened a few months ago.
He's taking his millions of dollars and making a competitor, now that the FTC has banned non-competes.
Everybody else seems to be taking this way too seriously. This is just Richard Hendricks getting sick of Gavin Belsum's shit, Gavin Belsum being sick of Richard Hendricks's shit, and them publicly being polite while behind closed doors they're trying to kill each other.
I look forward to the rumors of Sam's house being torn to shreds in the next few days.