Ilya Sutskever, one of the founders of OpenAI, leaves the company | Technology

Ilya Sutskever, until now chief scientist at OpenAI, leaves the company that amazed the world with ChatGPT. This was announced online by one of the founders and, until recently, a member of the hard core of the technology company, which he built together with Sam Altman (CEO), Greg Brockman (president) and Mira Murati (technology director). .

Sutskever’s position at OpenAI was compromised when his attempt to force Sam Altman’s dismissal failed in November last year. The machine learning expert supported the dismissal of Altman by the company’s board of directors, which, five days later, after the threat of a mass resignation of the workforce, was forced to reinstate him. After that move, Sutskever was not expelled from OpenAI, but he was no longer one of its key executives. Hence, his resignation has not been too surprising in the sector, although it still means that OpenAI loses its most prominent scientist.

One of the reasons given when Altman’s sudden dismissal was attempted was the executive’s excessive recklessness with the technologies developed by OpenAI. Sutskever fell into the sector of apocalyptics, those who wanted to have all the guarantees before publishing potentially harmful advances. There was speculation that Sutskever’s team made a breakthrough that would allow them to develop much more powerful AI models, and that this raised concerns among some employees that the company did not have adequate safeguards in place to market such advanced models. .

The resignation of Sutskever, who already has a replacement (Jakub Pachocki), joins that of three other prominent workers involved in the AI ​​security team: William Saunders, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Jan Leike. It is still unknown whether this flight of talent is due to their integration into a new project or to an escape from OpenAI for some undisclosed reason. In the case of Sutskever, it is the former, as he himself has advanced.

Ilya Sutskever was until now considered the brain of OpenAI. This Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist has been a student of Geoffrey Hinton, one of the fathers of machine learning, and Andrew Ng. Before joining OpenAI in 2015, he worked at Google Brain.

A hectic week in the sector

Big technology companies realized almost two years ago, when OpenAI released the first ChatGPT, that their future was there, in generative AI, which is capable of creating text, audio, photos or videos from written instructions. For days there has been speculation that OpenAI would release its own search tool, a move as feared by Google, the great dominator in this segment, as it was anticipated by experts.

Sam Altman himself, CEO of OpenAI, was in charge of cooling expectations last weekend. This Monday they would make an important presentation, he said, but it would not be either the search engine or GPT5, the new model they have been working on for months. What was finally announced was the launch of ChatGPT-4o, a free version of ChatGPT 4.0, which today is the most powerful version of OpenAI’s star tool.

The company also presented the new ChatGPT voice assistant, capable of translating conversations in real time (a function already performed by Google or Meta applications, among others), of intoning its responses with different emotions and of answering questions about objects or texts those you focus on with your mobile camera.

The next day, Google announced new developments in its search engine at its developer event. Essentially, what the company has done is introduce Gemini, its most advanced conversational model, into the search engine, so that the user can interact with the search engine as if they were talking to a person. You can ask it, for example, to look for tickets for a specific destination and, if it finds them below price X, buy them.

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