OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever announced his departure Tuesday from the startup that ignited a technological race in artificial intelligence with the release of ChatGPT. Sutskever, who is OpenAI's chief scientist, was on the board that voted to remove CEO and co-founder Sam Altman last November.
Altman's ouster threw the San Francisco startup into chaos, but the board hired Altman back a few days later after employees and investors revolted. Sutskever's place on the board was not renewed, but he continued in his position at OpenAI.
"It has been an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly," Sutskever said of his colleagues. He added that he will focus on a personal project. On Monday, OpenAI released a higher-performing and even more human-like version of the artificial intelligence technology that underpins ChatGPT, making it free for all users.
The new model, GPT-4o, will be rolled out in OpenAI's products over the next few weeks, the company said, and paying customers will have unlimited access to the tool. The company said the model could generate content or understand commands in speech, text or images. "It feels like AI from the movies," Altman said in a blog post. OpenAI and Microsoft are in an intense rivalry with Google to be generative AI's biggest player, but Facebook-owned Meta and startup Anthropic are also making big pushes to compete.
The day will come when " digital brains will be as good and even better than our own," Sutskever said during a talk at a TED AI Summit in San Francisco last year.