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Sutskever, the company’s co-founder and former chief scientist, will now be replaced by Jakub Pachocki.
Two veteran OpenAI employees, Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, have announced their resignation. This comes six months after there was an unsuccessful attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman from the AI company.
Sutskever, who co-founded the San Francisco start-up and has worked there for nearly a decade, said he was leaving his role as chief scientist in a post on X last night (14 May).
Calling the growth of OpenAI as “nothing short of miraculous”, Sutskever said that he is confident the company will build AI that is “both safe and beneficial” under the leadership of Altman, president and co-founder Greg Brockman, and chief technology officer Mira Murati.
He also congratulated Jakub Pachocki for replacing him as chief scientist at OpenAI.
“It was an honour and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly. So long, and thanks for everything,” Sutskever wrote. “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.”
Leike, who co-led the so-called superalignment group at OpenAI, was less verbose about his resignation, making the announcement on X earlier today simply with the words “I resigned”.
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…
— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024
The decision to fire Altman from the company happened suddenly in November last year, when OpenAI said Murati had been appointed interim CEO. According to the Financial Times, Sutskever was one of the employees who moved against Altman at the time.
In a statement, the company said its board conducted a “deliberative review process” and claimed Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications”. As a result, the board claimed it no longer had confidence in Altman’s ability to lead OpenAI. “We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI,” OpenAI said. “At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward.”
Altman’s departure came only days after he announced that the company paused new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups due to a “surge in usage”. Earlier that month, the company said it was suffering outages due to abnormal traffic that was “reflective” of a DDoS attack.
Brockman was also removed from OpenAI’s board but was allowed to keep his role as president. He quit OpenAI in response to these developments.
On 20 November, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Altman and Brockman were joining Microsoft to lead a new “advanced AI research team”. By 22 November, Altman was reinstated as CEO of OpenAI with a new initial board comprising of Larry Summers, Adam D’Angelo and Bret Taylor as chair.
Reports at the time suggested that employees of the company, baffled by the lack of explanation given to them around Altman’s dismissal, put pressure on the board to resign and reinstate the former CEO in what they believed to be his rightful position.
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