OpenAI Co-founder Ilya Sutskever Declares Exit From Company

Microsoft-backed OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is exiting the US-based Artificial Intelligence company, its Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman announced.

The artificial intelligence research and development startup, which was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others in the year 2015, is best known for ChatGPT, a chatbot driven by generative AI that allows one to have human like conversations with it to get answers on a seemingly unlimited range of topics ranging from debugging games, composing poems, emails and essays among others.

Altman, in a post on X on Wednesday said, “Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways.”

"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.

"His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important," the OpenAI CEO posted.

Sutskever also took to X to tweet, “After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company's trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I'm confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial.”

He went on to add, "I am excited for what comes next - a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time," Sutskever, 38, said announcing his decision to leave the company that he co-founded in the year 2015.

The Open AI chief scientist has in November along with three other board members forced out Sam Atlman, before saying he regretted the move.

As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, Sutskever had been part of an A.I. breakthrough involving neural networks -- the technology that has driven the field's progress over the last decade, reported NYT

OpenAI in a posting on its blog announced that Jakub Pachocki, the company's director of research, is being promoted to chief scientist.

"I am very confident he will lead us to make rapid and safe progress towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits everyone," Altman posted.

Pachocki, as the Chief Scientist at OpenAI is spearheading the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five. He holds a PhD in theoretical computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

According to a report in the New York Times, the company is valued at more than USD80 billion.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled a new version of its ChatGPT chatbot that can receive and respond to voice commands, images and videos.

The company said the new app -based on an Artificial Intelligence system called GPT-4- juggles audio, images and video significantly faster than previous versions of the technology. The app will be available for both smartphones and desktop computers.

According to a NYT report, the new app is part of a wider effort to combine conversational chatbots like ChatGPT with voice assistants like the Google Assistant and Apple's Siri. As Google merges its Gemini chatbot with the Google Assistant, Apple is preparing a new version of Siri that is more conversational. (ANI)