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The OpenAI chief scientist who nearly brought down CEO Sam Altman in a failed November mutiny as brief as it was spectacular is launching an AI company of his own.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ilya Sutskever revealed on Wednesday he was teaming up with OpenAI colleague Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross, a\u00a0former AI executive<\/a>\u00a0at Apple<\/a>, to found Safe Superintelligence Inc., a moniker chosen to reflect its purpose.<\/p>\n \u201cSSI is our mission, our name and our entire product roadmap, because it is our sole focus.\u201d the three wrote in a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0on the U.S. startup\u2019s barebones website. Building safe superintelligence, they went on to argue, was \u201cthe most important technical problem of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n Artificial superintelligence, or ASI, is believed to be the ultimate breakthrough in AI, since experts predict machines will not stop developing once they reach the kind of general-purpose intelligence know as AGI that is comparable to humans.\u00a0<\/p>\n I am starting a new company: https:\/\/t.co\/BG3K3SI3A1<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) June 19, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Luminaries in the field like the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton believe ASI to be an existential danger to mankind and building safeguards that align with our interest as a species was one of the\u00a0top missions<\/a>\u00a0Sutskever had at OpenAI.<\/p>\n His\u00a0high-profile departure<\/a>\u00a0in May came almost six months to the day after he joined independent board directors Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley and Adam D\u2019Angelo in removing Altman as CEO against the will of chair Greg Brockman, who immediately resigned.\u00a0<\/p>\n The spectacular coup, which Toner recently blamed on a\u00a0pattern of deception<\/a>\u00a0by Altman, threatened to tear the company apart. Sutskever quickly expressed his regret and reversed his position, demanding Altman be reinstated to prevent the potential downfall of OpenAI.\u00a0<\/p>\n I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.<\/p>\n \u2014 Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) November 20, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the aftermath<\/a>, Toner and McCauley left the non-profit board, while Sutskever seemingly vanished from the public eye all the way up until he announced his departure last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n In his resignation announcement, he implied he was voluntarily going to commit to a project \u201cvery personally meaningful to me\u201d and promised to share details at a later unspecified date.<\/p>\n His departure nonetheless set in motion events that quickly revealed deep governance issues that appeared to confirm the board\u2019s initial suspicions.\u00a0<\/p>\n First, Sutskever\u2019s co-lead Jan Leike accused the company of\u00a0breaking its promise<\/a>\u00a0to give their AI safety team 20% of its compute resources and\u00a0resigned<\/a>. Later it emerged employees at OpenAI were slapped with\u00a0water-tight gag orders<\/a>\u00a0that forbade them from criticizing the company after they left, at the penalty of\u00a0losing their vested shares<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Finally, actress Scarlett Johansson\u2014who portrayed an AI chatbot in Spike Jonze\u2019s 2013 sci-fi film Her<\/em>\u2014then sued the company claiming Altman effectively\u00a0stolen her voice<\/a>\u00a0to use for their latest AI product. OpenAI refuted the claim but pledged to change the sound anyway out of respect for her wishes.<\/p>\n After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. \u00a0The company\u2019s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I\u2019m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama<\/a>, @gdb<\/a>, @miramurati<\/a> and now, under the\u2026<\/p>\n \u2014 Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n These instances suggested OpenAI had abandoned its original purpose of developing AI that would benefit all of humanity\u2014instead to pursue commercial success.<\/p>\n \u201cThe people interested in safety like Ilya Sutskever wanted significant resources to be spent on safety, people interested in profits like Sam Altman didn\u2019t,\u201d Hinton told\u00a0Bloomberg<\/em>\u00a0last week.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sutskever has long been one of the brightest minds in the field of AI, researching artificial neural networks that conceptually mimic the human brain in order to train computers to learn and abstract based on data.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2012, he teamed up with\u00a0Hinton<\/a>\u00a0to collaborate on the 2012 landmark development\u00a0\u00a0of Alex Krizhevsky\u2019s deep neural network\u00a0AlexNet<\/a>, commonly considered AI\u2019s Big Bang moment. It was the first machine learning algorithm that could accurately label images fed to it, revolutionizing the field of computer vision.\u00a0<\/p>\n When OpenAI was founded in December 2015, Sutskever received top billing over co-chairs Altman and Elon Musk even though he was only research director. That made sense at the time, as it was formed originally as a non-profit that would create value for everyone rather than shareholders, prioritizing \u201ca good outcome for all over its own self-interest\u201d.<\/p>\n\n
Sutskever came to regret his role in briefly ousting Altman <\/h2>\n
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A leader in the field since AI\u2019s Big Bang Moment<\/h2>\n