Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, announced his resignation six months after trying to oust chief executive Sam Altman. Photo: Amir Cohen/REUTERS < p>When military coups fail, their supporters rarely withdraw immediately. Fearing they will be made martyrs, leading rebels are usually kept close and even promoted before they are later quietly written out of the picture.
Silicon Valley appears to be using the same strategy.< /p>
Last November, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, chief executive and president of Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence giant OpenAI, were ousted in a shock power grab.
A brief rebellion organized by the company's chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever failed. Altman and Brockman were reinstated days after employees threatened to quit en masse. The two returning executives apparently made peace with Sutskever, a Russian-born computer whiz whom Altman called «a gem of a man.»
But on Tuesday — almost six months after the failed coup — that détente changed again. Sutskever, a 38-year-old Russian-born computer scientist, announced he was leaving OpenAI, saying he wanted to focus on “a project that has very personal meaning to me.”
His departure completes the elimination of potential rivals by Altman, who, after a failed coup last November, has more power than ever over OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. But Sutzkever's departure also potentially risks reopening the wounds that led to Altman's dramatic ouster.
In choreographed statements Tuesday, Sutzkever, Altman and Brockman sought to emphasize that the split was amicable.
“It was an honor and privilege to work together and I will miss everyone dearly,” Sutzkever wrote. Altman said, “I find this very sad; Ilya is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light in our field and a dear friend.»
However, this cozy impression was soon destroyed. After the news broke, Jan Leike, the head of OpenAI who worked with Sutzkever to develop secure artificial intelligence, said that he, too, had left the company. Rejecting the subtleties of Sutzkever's statement, he simply tweeted: «I have resigned.»
The departure means that two of OpenAI's most senior executives working to prevent AI's biggest risks are now gone.
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO shared a photo of himself leaving the office after being fired in November. Photo: X.com/sama
In fact, Sutskever had been invisible for several months. In January, when asked for updates on his whereabouts, Altman himself said he had no idea.
“I don’t know how things are,” OpenAI’s chief executive said after being asked whether his chief scientist is still working at the company.
Few would doubt Sutskever's reputation as one of the world's leading experts in the field of artificial intelligence. Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, Sutskever's family immigrated to Israel when he was five, as a generation of Jewish citizens fled the collapsing Soviet Union. (Sutskever reportedly still recommends that colleagues read The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's account of Stalin's repressive regime.)
As a teenager, he enrolled in classes at the Open University of Israel, taking computer science courses remotely even though he was still in high school. school. After his family moved to Canada, he knocked on the door of Geoff Hinton, the famed British researcher known as the “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence,” and asked for a job, saying it was preferable to working in fast food.
< p>Sutskever later studied at the University of Toronto under Hinton, working on breakthroughs that led to today's artificial intelligence boom, such as automatic image recognition.
“Ilya is an incredible researcher. His vision has been the most important factor in OpenAI's success,” says Hinton.
Satskever followed Hinton to Google, but in 2015 he received an email from Altman inviting him to dinner with Elon Musk. Musk fell out with Google chief executive Larry Page and provided seed funding to a rival nonprofit artificial intelligence lab that became OpenAI. Musk called Sutzkever «a pillar of OpenAI's success» and said hiring him was «one of the toughest recruiting battles we've ever had.»
Sutskever and Altman shared a goal: to develop «AGI,» or artificial general intelligence, a system powerful enough to outperform humans at most tasks. Proponents say AGI will be the last human invention because we will later leave this task to machines.
On the way to achieving this goal, Sutzkever was instrumental in the development of systems like ChatGPT, which took the world by storm 18 months ago.
While ChatGPT and OpenAI are now world famous, it is the success that is the product of years of labor in relative obscurity . This work helped to firmly unite the company's original staff.
Sutskever officiated at Brockman's civil wedding ceremony in 2019, which took place at the company's offices, highlighting the closeness between OpenAI's senior management.
❤️ https://t.co/rAydGUZebX
— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) December 1, 2023
A few months after the release of ChatGPT, however, OpenAI management was divided on the future direction of the technology they had created.
Sutzkever has increasingly focused on concerns that AI could become superhuman faster than we can tame it. He and other OpenAI board members were concerned about Altman's apparent commercial focus and questioned his commitment to the company's goal of safely developing AI.
In a fateful video call last November, Sutskever and his allies on the board told Altman that he had been fired as CEO, prompting an outcry from employees at OpenAI and Microsoft, its key investor.
A few days later, Sutskever switched sides, saying that “I deeply regret my participation in the actions of the board of directors” and vowing to reunite the company.
Altman was reinstated as CEO and Sutzkever was demoted from the new and more commercially oriented board of directors. Although he remained with the company in the short term, his fate was potentially sealed, especially after the review of the fiasco largely cleared Altman and returned him to the OpenAI board of directors. Sutzkever is believed to have been rarely seen at OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters since the coup.
Sutzkever's security concerns appear to have fallen off the agenda. The coup, which took place last November, came days after world leaders and tech giants gathered for Rishi Sunak's AI Security Summit at Bletchley Park. Next week, the second international conference in Seoul will be less well attended and the word «security» has been dropped from the event's title.
Meanwhile, commercial pressure around AI has intensified. ChatGPT faces growing competition from well-funded rivals such as Anthropic, which on Wednesday named Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger as its chief product officer.
Microsoft, OpenAI's main source of funding, has been hedging its bets with investments in rival companies. And Google's artificial intelligence is improving rapidly. (News of Sutzkever's departure came hours after archrival Google unveiled a series of updates to its own artificial intelligence systems, raising speculation that the announcement may have been coordinated to steal the search giant's thunder.)
Altman controlled the situation. a series of significant departures at OpenAI in recent months that have helped consolidate its power. His control of the company at the center of the artificial intelligence boom is now virtually unchallenged, but he will likely be nervously watching what the genius behind many of OpenAI's breakthroughs does next.
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