"After almost a decade, I decided to leave OpenAI. The company's trajectory has been miraculous, and I am confident that OpenAI will build a safe and beneficial AGI under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati, and @merettm excellent research." It's been a privilege to work with all of you and I will miss you very much. Goodbye and thank you for all you do. ”
This morning (May 15), Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, suddenly announced that she was leaving OpenAI.
Ilya posted a photo with OpenAI's veterans as a final farewell.
Coincidentally, OpenAI just released a new generation of flagship generative model GPT-4o, desktop app, and demonstrated a series of new capabilities at the "Spring New Product Launch Conference" yesterday.
It is understood that in the OpenAI Gong Dou incident in November last year, due to concerns about the security of the company's model, Ilya and the board members launched an action against Sam Altman.
After the incident, Ilya barely attended any academic lectures or gave any interviews and has since disappeared.
Since then, the U.S. industry has been concerned about "What did Ilya see?" Where has he been and what is he doing? ”
What's even more confusing is that after the successful launch of Sora, Ilya was not included in the contributor list.
Even Ilya's name is not in the defendant column where Musk sued OpenAI.
This made the outside world speculate for a while: perhaps Musk has confirmed that Ilya is no longer working at OpenAI.
Ilya's official announcement today seems to confirm speculation that he may have left OpenAI a long time ago.
Regarding Ilya's departure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said:
Ilya and OpenAl are about to part ways. It's very sad for me.
Ilya is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guide in our field, and a dear friend of mine. His talent and vision are well known, and his passion and compassion, though less well known, are no less important.
Without him, OpenAl wouldn't be where it is today. While he has his own meaningful work to do, I am eternally grateful for all he has done here and is committed to the mission we started together. I'm glad that for so long I've been able to stay in close contact with such a truly extraordinary genius who is so focused on creating the best possible future for humanity.
Jakub will be our new Chief Scientist. Jakub is undoubtedly one of the greatest talents of our generation and I'm thrilled to have him take the baton. He has been responsible for many of our most important projects, and I am very confident that he will lead us quickly and safely towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all."
Co-founder Greg Brockman wrote a long thank you to Ilya.
I am very grateful to Ilya, who is not only my co-founder and friend, but also a witness to my wedding.
Together, we mapped out the future of OpenAI. Since late 2015, OpenAI, as a non-profit organization, has been working to make the development of AGI run smoothly, although there was no clear plan at that time.
In our early days, Ilya and I spent a lot of time thinking about the company's culture, technology direction, and strategy in depth. We realized that in order to build an unprecedented supercomputer, we needed to raise far more money than we had anticipated.
In this nonprofit, we co-funded, and while it exceeded others' expectations, it still fell far short of the need. Later, we proposed the creation of a for-profit organization that would serve its original mission. Once established, we continued to coordinate and shape the direction of the company, focusing on the AGI mission while addressing many practical issues and guaranteeing progress every day.
Ilya is an artist. His vision and enthusiasm were infectious, and he helped me understand the field when I first started out. He has the courage to delve deeper into the logical conclusions of his intuition. We were inspired by the 1962 publication of A Brief History of the Future (a book that describes scientists who falsely claimed that light bulbs, flight, and orbit were impossible, and that these achievements were not long in coming).
So, despite the suspicions that AGI is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, we continue to think and act based on our belief in deep learning.
This mission is far from complete, and Ilya has played a key role in making OpenAI what it is today. Thank you for everything he has done for this.
Jakub Pachocki, who is currently the director of research at OpenAI and the lead director of GPT-4, will subsequently become Ilya's successor. He said:
Ilya introduced me to the world of deep learning research and has been my mentor and wonderful partner for many years. His vision for the future of deep learning has laid the foundation for OpenAl and the field of artificial intelligence.
I'm so grateful to him for the countless conversations we've had, from high-level discussions on the future of AI to in-depth technical whiteboard sessions. Ilya, I will miss working with you.
Did you notice?
Whether it is Ilya's official announcement or the content released by Ultraman and others, it seems to have been rehearsed in advance, but everyone chose a suitable time to make it public.
Soon, the outside world began to pay attention to "where will Ilya go next?" ”
Some netizens speculated, "What would Ilya and Andrej look like if they started a truly open AI company?" ”
Andrej Karpathy, who is also one of the founding members of OpenAI, left on the eve of Sora's release, and if the two of them join forces, it could be another big event in the field of artificial intelligence.
To this, Ilya responded in a tweet, "I'm looking forward to the next plans – this project means a lot to me personally, and I'll share the details in due course." ”
Background information:
Dr. Ilya Sutskever graduated from the University of Toronto under the tutelage of Geoffray Hinton, the famous "Godfather of Artificial Intelligence".
After graduating with his Ph.D., he worked in Stanford Ng's team and Google Brain. He joined OpenAI in 2016 as co-founder and research director, and was promoted to chief scientist two years later.
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