Six months after a failed attempt by the board to oust fellow co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever is leaving the company.
Sutskever and OpenAI announced the news on Tuesday, with Sutskever hinting at a new "personally meaningful" project that's in the works.
"After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI," Sutskever wrote on X. "I am excited for what comes next — a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time."
Sutskever had been OpenAI's chief scientist. The company also announced his successor, Jakub Pachocki, who was promoted from his previous role as OpenAI's director of research.
In a blog post announcing the transition, Altman said he was "sad" to see Sutskever leave.
"Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways. This is very sad to me," Altman wrote. "OpenAI would not be what it is without him. Although he has something personally meaningful he is going to go work on, I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together."
Sutskever was also one of OpenAI's board members until November, when he and three other board members voted to remove Altman as CEO.
Altman was reinstated within a week, but Sutskever and two other board members — robotics entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and AI expert Helen Toner — lost their board seats as a condition of Altman's return.
Sutskever remained in his position as chief scientist, though.
In March, OpenAI announced that Altman would rejoin the board along with three new directors: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, former Sony executive Nicole Seligman and Sue Desmond-Hellmann, who was previously CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
