Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist who in November joined other board members in ousting Sam Altman, the company's high-profile CEO, helped found an artificial intelligence startup.
The new startup is called x.com/ssi/status/1803472825476587910″ title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Secure superintelligence. Its goal is to produce superintelligence, a machine that is smarter than humans, safely, according to company spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Meservey.
Dr. Sutskever, who said he regretted taking action against Altman, declined to comment. The news was previously reported by ai-focused-research-lab” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Bloomberg.
Dr. Sutskever, 38, left OpenAI last month and announced at the time that he would start a new project, but did not provide details. Meservey declined to name who is funding the company or how much he has raised. He said that as it builds secure superintelligence, the company will not launch other products.
Dr. Sutskever founded the company together with Daniel Gross, who worked in ai at Apple, and Daniel Levy, who worked with Dr. Sutskever at OpenAI. Dr. Sutskever's title at the new company will be chief scientist, but he describes his role, according to Ms. Meservey, as “responsible for revolutionary advances.”
In November 2022, OpenAI captured the world's imagination with the launch of ChatGPT, an online chatbot that could answer questions, write term papers, generate computer code, and even mimic a human conversation. The tech industry quickly adopted what it called generative artificial intelligence: technologies that can generate text, images and other media.
Many experts believe these technologies are poised to remake everything from email programs to Internet search engines to digital assistants. Some believe this transformation will have as big an impact as the web browser or smartphone.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems.)
Altman became the face of the movement toward generative ai when he met with lawmakers, regulators and investors around the world and testified before Congress. In November, Dr. Sutskever and three other members of OpenAI's board of directors unexpectedly ousted him, saying they could no longer trust him with the company's plan to one day create a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
Days later, after hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Dr. Sutskever said he regretted his decision to fire Mr. Altman. Altman returned as CEO after he and the board agreed to replace two board members with Bret Taylor, a former Salesforce executive, and Lawrence Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary. Dr. Sutskever effectively resigned from the board.
Last year, Dr. Sutskever helped create what was called a Superalignment team within OpenAI whose goal was to ensure that future ai technologies did no harm. Like others in the field, he became increasingly concerned that ai could become dangerous and perhaps even destroy humanity.
Jan Leike, who led the Superalignment team alongside Dr. Sutskever, also resigned from OpenAI. He has since been hired by OpenAI competitor Anthropic, another company founded by former OpenAI researchers.
