OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever departs the company

OpenAI is currently experiencing the end of a certain era in its brief existence. Today, it revealed that its co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has decided to leave the company.

The news was revealed on OpenAI’s blog via an email that was sent out to the company’s team members by co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. Altman wrote:

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.

Altman’s email added that Sutskever is leaving OpenAI because he has “something personally meaningful he is going to go work on” but details were not provided.

In his own message on his X (formerly Twitter) account, Sutskever wrote:

It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly. So long, and thanks for everything.

The departure of Sutskever comes several months after the now former board members of OpenAI fired Altman as CEO in November 2023, That plan backfired, as most of the company’s team members revolted in support of Altman. Just a few days later, a new board was put in place and Altman returned as CEO. However, the status of Sutskever at the company remained something of a mystery until today.

Altman also revealed that the new chief scientist at OpenAI is Jakub Pachocki. According to the company’s announcement, Pachocki was previously named as Director of Research for the company and helped to develop GPT-4.

Altman added:

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.

This major shakeup at OpenAI comes just one day after it revealed ChatGPT-4o. The new and powerful AI model will be available for anyone to access, including for free ChatGPT users.