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Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, the company behind the groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot, has announced his departure.
This move comes at a pivotal moment for the artificial intelligence industry, as major tech companies compete for dominance in the generative AI space.
In a statement posted on OpenAI's blog, CEO Sam Altman acknowledged Sutskever's significant contributions, stating, "OpenAI would not be what it is without him." Jakub Pachocki, previously the company's director of research, has been named as the new chief scientist.
Sutskever announced his decision to leave on X, saying, "After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI."
He also hinted at a new project, stating, "I am working on a new project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time."
This departure follows a tumultuous period at OpenAI last year, during which Altman was briefly fired and then reinstated, with Sutskever playing a key role in both decisions. Following Altman's return, Sutskever was removed from the OpenAI board.
The announcement of Sutskever's exit coincides with OpenAI's unveiling of GPT-4o, a new AI model capable of realistic voice conversation and interaction across texts and images.
Despite ChatGPT's initial rapid growth, its website traffic has fluctuated over the past year, according to analytics firm Similarweb.
Sutskever, a prominent AI researcher, previously worked at Google Brain and as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford. His career began alongside Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in the AI field.
