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Sebastian Bubeck, a former assistant professor at Princeton, had been with Microsoft for more than a decade.
Microsoft’s vice-president of AI Sebastien Bubeck is set to leave the software giant after more than a decade to join the Chat-GPT maker OpenAI. However, it wasn’t revealed what role Bubeck would assume at the start-up.
“Sebastien has decided to leave Microsoft to further his work toward developing AGI [artificial general intelligence],” Microsoft said in a statement yesterday (14 October). “We appreciate the contributions Sebastien has made to Microsoft and look forward to continuing our relationship through his work with OpenAI.”
Bubeck has worked at Microsoft for more than 10 years and has been a key figure in the company’s AI innovation. He led the development of the Phi SLMs (small language models), which aim to be nearly as effective as large language models (LLMs) while using far less compute power.
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the Phi-3 suite of open models, calling them the “most capable and cost effective small language models available”.
“Instead of training on just raw web data, why don’t you look for data which is of extremely high quality?” Bubeck asked rhetorically, at the company’s announcement of the Phi-3.
Most of Bubeck’s coworkers who worked on Phi LLMs continue to remain at Microsoft to develop the models, the company said in the statement.
News of Bubeck joining OpenAI follows a series of upper-level personnel changes and company restructuring at OpenAI over the past few months.
Last month, the company’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, research VP Barret Zoph and chief research officer Bob McGrew all announced their departures from OpenAI – the day the company announced a structural shift from a not-for-profit to a for-profit company.
While earlier this year, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman and former executive Jan Leike announced their departures to join Anthropic, a rival AI company.
Co-founder Ilya Sutskever resigned from the company in May to start his own safety-focused AI company and Andrej Karpathy, another co-founder, left the company in February to work on founding an AI education start-up.
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