Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs
“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,” Altman said. “OpenAI would not be what it is without him. Although he has something personally meaningful he is going to go work on, I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together.”
Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research. Pachocki joined in 2017 as a research lead on OpenAI’s Dota team — the team that built an AI system capable of defeating human players at Valve’s Dota 2 strategy game. Pachocki then became research lead at OpenAI’s reasoning and science of deep learning orgs before being promoted to principal of research.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Pachocki would also take over as head of OpenAI’s Superalignment team, which was until now under the purview of Sutskever and Jan Leike. Leike has also resigned from OpenAI, per The New York Times.
