Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist at OpenAI, will no longer be part of the board, said Sam Altman in the latest OpenAI blog on his return as the CEO of OpenAI.
“I love and respect Ilya, I think he’s a guiding light of the field and a gem of a human being,” “I harbour zero ill will towards him. While Ilya will no longer serve on the board, we hope to continue our working relationship and are discussing how he can continue his work at OpenAI.”
There is possibly some misalignment between Altman and Sutskever’s vision of what the company wants, and is further exaggerated after Sutskever was the one who fired Altman on a Google Meet call.
Now, Altman, Greg Brockman, and Mira Murati are going to lead the company, with Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo as the initial board, and Microsoft as an observer part of the board.
building this together
️ pic.twitter.com/s4PVAywD9e
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) November 30, 2023
More drama from OpenAI?
The plot for the upcoming film, I Love You All (Ilya) is going through a lot of twists and turns. Sutskever seems to be on the grey line now, where he might either quit, or end up getting fired. Though Altman has said that there are no ill intentions against him, Sutskever might be considering leaving OpenAI, though he has not mentioned that.
It is not like he wasn’t guilty with whatever unfolded. Sutskever made a public apology on X that he in no way wanted to harm OpenAI, and deeply regrets his participation in the board’s actions. But now the whole board of the company has changed, even Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley are out of the board. Toner posted on X about resignation from the OpenAI board, but did not say anything concrete about her next plans, just focus on AI safety policy.
Moreover, at the recent talk at NYT Dealbook, Elon Musk said that he has reached out to Sutskever, but he does not want to talk. Musk has been praising Sutskever all this while, and was on his side during all the OpenAI weekend drama. “Ilya has a good moral compass and does not seek power. He would not take such drastic action unless he felt it was absolutely necessary,” Musk posted on X.
Musk had also asked Sutskever on X about why he fired Altman, as there were rumours that OpenAI has built a model that is way too powerful, which allegedly scared Sutskever. This was possibly in reference to Q* that OpenAI is working on, which got leaked unfortunately according to Altman.
Why did you take such a drastic action?
If OpenAI is doing something potentially dangerous to humanity, the world needs to know.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 21, 2023
If Sutskever leaves, there might be a possible halt to what OpenAI is developing, including Q*. A conspiratorial take can be that Sutskever purposefully leaked Q* to have leverage to not leave OpenAI.
Irrespective of what Sutskever did or did not do, it is clear that he was the most crucial team member of OpenAI since the beginning. Musk, the founder of OpenAI called Sutskever the ‘lynch pin’ of the company. He even fought with Larry Page to poach him from Google and bring to OpenAI.
Everyone wants Ilya
Even if Sutskever has denied Musk about joining xAI at the moment, there might be still a chance for him to come back, given that he is garnering praises and being poached by everyone at the moment, and Musk was the one who hired him first.
The other possibility is that Sutskever might end up joining Google or DeepMind, where he would be able to work on similar projects to OpenAI, and be able to build AGI driven models, while also being aligned with safety and security principles that he believes in.
Interestingly, OpenAI board members, including Sutskever, reportedly approached Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for a possible merger of the companies during the whole Altman firing fiasco. Though it is not clear if Sutskever was on board with the plan or it was just Toner and McCauley, Sutskever might have possible interests and alignment with Anthropic’s safety driven approach towards AI.
Toner had praised Anthropic and criticised OpenAI for their approach towards generative AI, which Altman had major contentions with. If Toner also ends up at Anthropic, Sutskever might also get poached by the company, where he can join his former OpenAI team members, including the co-founders of Anthropic, who are former OpenAI employees.
As soon as the OpenAI employees started quitting the company following Altman’s departure, almost every tech company in the world was poaching them. A lot of them were ready to join Microsoft, which Altman was also reportedly joining before coming back to OpenAI. At the same time, everyone was taking a shot at Sutskever for firing Altman.
in one tweet: q* spooks board, board fires sam, hires mira, mira hires sam, board replaces her with guy from twitch, satya hires sam, 98% of openai threatens to quit, ilya's like oops j/k nm, new ceo says to the board "pics or gtfo", board has no pics, brings sam back, q* leaks.
— Siqi Chen (@blader) November 24, 2023
All this is if Sutskever leaves OpenAI, which he has not shown any signs of currently. He has even reposted the new announcement which included Altman’s message, which seems like he is fine with whatever has taken place. Being the chief scientist of the company, it is plausible to say that OpenAI would be nothing without Ilya, even Murati would agree.
It is not like he does not have options though.
Maybe it was Altman’s plan all along, as it was highlighted in the announcement – “Greg and I are partners in running this company. We have never quite figured out how to communicate that on the org chart, but we will.”
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