Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and chief scientist at OpenAI, has left the company. The former Google AI researcher was one of the four board members who voted in November to fire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, triggering days of chaos that saw staff threaten to quit en masse and Altman ultimately restored. Altman confirmed Sutskever’s departure Tuesday in a post on the social platform X. In the months after Altman’s return to OpenAI, Sutskever had rarely made public appearances for the company.
“I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI,” he posted on X in November. Sutskever has often spoken publicly of his belief that OpenAI was working towards developing so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, and of the need to do so safely. Sutskever blazed a trail in machine learning from an early age, becoming a protégé of deep-learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.