Ilya Sutskever added that it was an “honor and a privilege” to work with the OpenAI colleagues.

OpenAI co-founder departs

OpenAI co-founder departs months after the company went through a leadership crisis involving co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.

In November, OpenAI’s board said in a statement that Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.” The issue quickly came to look more complex. The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported that Sutskever trained his focus on ensuring that artificial intelligence would not harm humans, while others, including Altman, were instead more eager to push ahead with delivering new technology.

Sutskever’s replacement

The OpenAI CEO also announced that Jakub Pachocki would replace Sutskever as the firm’s new chief scientist.

“Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation; 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,” he said.

Leadership crisis at OpenAI

When Sam Altman was asked to leave, all OpenAI employees signed an open letter saying they would leave in response to the board’s action. Days later, Altman was back at the company, and board members Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley and Sutskever, who had voted to oust Altman, were out. Adam D’Angelo, who had also voted to push out Altman, stayed on the board.

Sam Altman on Ilya Sutskever’s announcement

When Altman was asked about Sutskever’s status on a Zoom call with reporters at the time, he said there were no updates to share. “I love Ilya. … I hope we work together for the rest of our careers, my career, whatever,” Altman said. “Nothing to announce today.”

On Tuesday, Altman shared his thoughts on Sutskever’s departure.

“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 wrote on X. “His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important.” Altman said research director Jakub Pachocki, who has been at OpenAI since 2017, will replace Sutskever as chief scientist.

New board members

OpenAI has announced new board members, including former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Microsoft obtained a nonvoting board observer position.

In March, OpenAI announced its new board and the wrap-up of an internal investigation by U.S. law firm WilmerHale into the events leading up to Altman’s ouster. Altman rejoined OpenAI’s board, and three new board members were announced: Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former EVP and global general counsel of Sony and president of Sony Entertainment; and Fidji Simo, CEO and chair of Instacart.

The three new members will “work closely with current board members Adam D’Angelo, Larry Summers and Bret Taylor as well as Greg, Sam, and OpenAI’s senior management,” according to a company release in March, referencing OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman.

OpenAI’s new AI model

The OpenAI co-founder departs news comes a day after OpenAI launched a new AI model and desktop version of ChatGPT, along with an updated user interface, the company’s latest effort to expand use of its popular chatbot.

The update brings the GPT-4 model to everyone, including OpenAI’s free users, technology chief Mira Murati said Monday in a livestreamed event. She added that the new model, GPT-4o, is “much faster,” with improved capabilities in text, video and audio.

OpenAI said it eventually plans to allow users to video chat with ChatGPT. “This is the first time that we are really making a huge step forward when it comes to the ease of use,” Murati said.

In 2015, Altman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, another OpenAI co-founder, wanted Sutskever, then a research scientist at Google, to become the budding startup’s top scientist, according to the lawsuit Musk filed against OpenAI in March.

“Dr. Sutskever went back and forth on whether to leave Google and join the project, but it was ultimately a call from Mr. Musk on the day OpenAI, Inc. was publicly announced that convinced Dr. Sutskever to commit to joining the project as OpenAI, Inc.’s Chief Scientist,” the legal filing said.

All about Ilya Sutskever?

Ilya Sutskever, a Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist, who is a co-founder of OpenAI. He studied at the Open University of Israel between 2000 and 2002, following which he moved to Canada with his family and attended the University of Toronto.

In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. He is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper.

Sutskever’s also briefly did a postdoctoral stint with Andrew Ng at Stanford University, followed by a return to the University of Toronto to join DNNResearch, a venture stemming from Hinton’s research group.

The post OpenAI Co-Founder Ilya Sutskever Departs Amid Leadership Changes appeared first on Industry Leaders Magazine.

The ChatGPT maker is reportedly set to unveil Google and Microsoft’s rival search engine this week at a developer conference.

OpenAI search engine

OpenAI announcement date, though subject to change, has not been previously reported. As per report from sources Microsoft-backed OpenAI is working on a search product to potentially compete with Alphabet’s Google and with Perplexity, a well-funded AI search startup.

OpenAI search engine announcement could be timed a day before the Tuesday that is the start of Google’s annual I/O conference. This is where the tech giant is expected to unveil a bunch of AI-related products.

OpenAI’s search product is an extension of its flagship ChatGPT product, and enables ChatGPT to pull in direct information from the Web and include citations. ChatGPT is OpenAI’s chatbot product that uses the company’s cutting-edge AI models to generate human-like responses to text prompts.

Google competition

Industry observers have long called ChatGPT an alternative for gathering online information, though it has struggled with providing accurate and real-time information from the Web. OpenAI earlier gave it an integration with Microsoft’s Bing for paid subscribers. Meanwhile, Google has announced generative AI features for its own namesake engine.

OpenAI declined to comment on the upcoming announcement, Reuters reported.

Startup Perplexity 

Startup Perplexity, which has a valuation of $1 billion, was founded by a former OpenAI researcher, and has gained traction through providing an AI-native search interface that shows citations in results and images as well as text in its responses. It has 10 million monthly active users, according to a January blog post from the startup.

Enhance OpenAI ChatGPT

This new venture is expected to enhance the capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, allowing it to fetch real-time information from the web and include citations in its responses, the report added.

At the time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT product was called the fastest application to ever reach 100 million monthly active users after it launched in late 2022. However, worldwide traffic to ChatGPT’s website has been on a roller-coaster ride in the past year and is only now returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb, and the AI company is under pressure to expand its user base.

An earlier attempt to bring updated and real-world information in to ChatGPT, called ChatGPT plugins, was retired in April, according to a help center posting on OpenAI’s website.

OpenAI poaching Google employees

Because of this OpenAI is reportedly going after many Google employees in an attempt to create a team that will develop a search engine for its chatbot ChatGPT.

Google has become a prime target for companies who are seeking to poach experts as it has some of the sector’s top researchers.

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