OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever leaves company; Jakub Pachocki appointed chief scientist

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is leaving the company after almost a decade.

CEO Sam Altman said in the post, “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.“ 

Altman also announced the appointment of Jakub Pachocki as the company's new chief scientist. Pachocki was earlier the director of research and was spearheading the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five. 

Sutskever posted on X that he has decided to leave OpenAI after almost a decade. He also said he is excited for what comes next—"a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time."

Interestingly, Sutskever was on the board of the company that had voted to oust Altman in November 2023. However, days after participating in Altman's firing, Sutskever signed an employee letter demanding Altman’s return. Altman returned to the company and board after employees of the company threatened to quit and join Microsoft. 

Launch of GPT-4o

These developments come close on the heels of the launch of OpenAI's new flagship artificial intelligence (AI) model.

On May 14, Open-AI launched GPT-4o, which is said to reason across audio, vision, and text in real-time.

The latest update is available to all ChatGPT users, including those on the free plan. "So far, GPT-4 class models have only been available to people who pay a monthly subscription," said Altman.

GPT-4o, wherein ‘o’ represents ‘omni’, will be rolled out to all users for free with usage limits, while paid users will have greater capacity limits. 

Meanwhile, Google has also launched a slew of AI models at its flagship developer conference I/O. It has also introduced upgrades to a variety of its offerings on the back of its proprietary Gemini model.