OpenAI, one of the most famous companies working with artificial intelligence, perhaps one of the most popular fields of recent years, has been in chaos for a while. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, was fired from the company by the decision of the founding partners and the board of directors on Friday. Investors then tried to get OpenAI to rehire Sam Altman over the weekend, but this did not happen. In fact, OpenAI’s largest shareholder, Microsoft, announced that it had hired Sam Altman to lead a new artificial intelligence research department. As of today, it has been announced that Sam Altman has been reappointed as the CEO of OpenAI with a new board of directors.
There is still no definitive explanation as to what was the reason behind Sam Altman’s dismissal from his position at OpenAI, but after a closer look, we see Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders of the company and thought to be the main brain in the artificial intelligence developed after this dismissal. It is known that Altman, like every CEO, fell into conflict with the board of directors and was removed from his post because he aimed to make quick profits and expand the company based on the technology developed. So who exactly is Ilya Sutskever, who is thought to be the key figure in making this decision? Let’s get to know this genius name more closely.
Sutskever has a lifeline that we are not used to seeing very often.
Sutskever, who is known to have been born in the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1986 (his exact year of birth is unknown), moved to Israel with his family when he was only 5 years old. Sutskever, who studied at university here between 2000 and 2002, later moved to Canada and started studying at the University of Toronto. Sutskever, who graduated from the department of mathematics in 2005, is doing a master’s degree in computer science and immediately completed a doctorate in the same department.
The life of Sutskever, who will play a major role in the development of artificial intelligence especially in recent years, changed greatly during his doctorate because his advisor during this period was Geoffrey Hinton, one of the most competent names in the field of “deep learning”.
The first projects started to arrive in 2012.
In 2012, Sutskever participated in the Imagenet competition with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton and introduced “AlexNet”, which can be considered the first in the field of deep learning. AlexNet, one of the first successful artificial neural networks in this field, came first in the competition by outperforming its competitors and an important step was taken in deep learning. Hinton even won the Turing Award in 2018 thanks to AlexNet.
Ilya Sutskever is thought to be the real brains behind OpenAI.
Sutskever is an engineer dedicated to the field of deep learning. Sutskever started working at Google with the success he achieved with AlexNet, and after working at the Big Tech company for about 3 years, he joined OpenAI as a founding member. “I don’t think there is a better candidate than Sutskever to be OpenAI’s chief scientist,” said Yoshua Bengio, the world’s leading artificial intelligence expert. said. Elon Musk, co-founder of OpenAI, said about Sutskever: “The cornerstone of OpenAI’s success.” He used the following expressions:
Sutskever, who paved the way for the development of artificial intelligence, is also afraid of them.
Speaking about artificial intelligence in The Guardian’s documentary published last week, Sutskever said, “Artificial intelligence is a wonderful thing. It will solve all the problems we have today. Unemployment, disease and poverty will be solved.” he said, but in the continuation of his words, he also talked about the scary aspects of artificial intelligence. “But it will also create new problems. The fake news problem will be millions of times worse. Cyber attacks will become more extreme. We will have fully automated AI weapons.” Sutskever focuses on whether OpenAI has remained true to its mission of benefiting humanity without profit since ChatGPT was launched.
Sutskever; A genius who is afraid of what he creates, or a misguided name in the business world?
When we look at Ilya’s career and statements, we see that he has achieved great things and yet is afraid of the speed and potential of what has been achieved. Maybe that’s why he wanted Altman to be removed from the company. Because Altman; He was an actor who enabled OpenAI to grow very quickly. But this is where we need to step in. Sutskever stated in his Twitter post that he was deeply saddened by Altman’s firing. Shortly after this announcement, we saw that Sam Altman was reappointed as the CEO of OpenAI. It seems that Sutskever had a hand in this decision.
Elon Musk also asked Sutskever a completely different question.
Elon Musk, one of the founding partners of the company, wrote under Sutskever’s post: “Why did you take such a harsh measure? If OpenAI is doing something potentially dangerous for humanity, the world needs to know about it.” He made a statement as follows.
The problem seems to be solved in OpenAI for now.
In fact, Sutskever later stated in his statement that he regretted this dismissal. This firing, which took place without the knowledge of even the company’s important shareholders, could have caused great damage to the company. We expect OpenAI to be on the agenda with new events in this process. Let’s see what will happen, we will see together.
Our other contents we have prepared regarding the artificial intelligence agenda: