- OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever left the company in May after a failed attempt to oust Sam Altman.
- On June 19, he announced that he would be launching a new AI project called “Safe Superintellgence Inc.”
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Sutskever's past work sparked “the big bang of deep learning.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had high praise for OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who left the company following the turmoil surrounding the firing of CEO Sam Altman.
During a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology on June 14, the NVIDIA co-founder singled out Sutskever and two other prominent computer scientists for their pioneering work on a convolutional neural network (CNN) called AlexNet, a program that can perform image recognition.
According to the AlexNet research paper, the CNN relied on Nvidia's graphics processing unit (GPU) — the chips that helped tech companies become multi-trillion-dollar businesses during the AI boom — to recognize more than a million high-resolution images in 2012. The model was designed by Alex Krizhevsky, Geoffrey E. Hinton and Sutskever.
“Geoff Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever shocked the computer vision community by training AlexNet using NVIDIA CUDA GPUs and winning the 2012 ImageNet challenge,” said Jensen. “This was a big moment, a big bang for deep learning. It was a pivotal moment that marked the beginning of the AI revolution.”
A 2017 Quartz article described the 2012 competition as the “single event” in which AlexNet crushed its competitors and sparked an artificial intelligence boom.
“Yes, I agree with his comments, that's all I can say :),” Krizhevsky said in a brief email to Business Insider.
Sutskever and Hinton did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside business hours.
Three years after AlexNet, Sutskever founded OpenAI with Altman, Elon Musk, and a team of researchers.
Altman's term as OpenAI's chief scientist ended in May, six months after he and company executives sought his firing in November.
Business Insider reported that his role in the chaotic attempt to fire Altman cast a shadow over his future at OpenAI, and Sutskever later said he regretted his decision to support Altman's firing.
In June, a month after announcing he was leaving the company he co-founded, Sutskever announced he was launching a new artificial intelligence venture, a research lab called Super Safe Intelligence.
In a statement, the institute said Super Safe Intelligence has “one goal and one product: safe superintelligence.”
A spokesman for Super Safe Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside business hours.
