Nobel Prize winner praises ex-student for ousting Altman from OpenAI
2024 Nobel Prize laureate in Physics and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has said he was pleased with Sam Altman's ouster from OpenAI last year. The decision was made on the advice of Ilya Sutskever, one of Hinton's ex-students and former chief scientist at OpenAI. "I'm particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman," Hinton, known as one of the "Godfathers of AI," said at a press conference on Tuesday.
'Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits'
Sutskever, who did his Ph.D. in computer science under Hinton at the University of Toronto in 2013, was instrumental in Altman's firing. "So OpenAI was set up with a big emphasis on safety. Its primary objective was to develop artificial general intelligence and ensure that it was safe," Hinton said. "And over time, it turned out that Sam Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits. And I think that's unfortunate," he added.
Sutskever's foresight in AI potential and risks
In an earlier interview with Nikkei, Hinton had praised Sutskever's early understanding of both the promise and peril of AI. "Ilya changed his mind before me. It turned out he was right," Hinton said. This was at a time when digital intelligences were still not seen as capable as humans in complex tasks like language comprehension. Hinton was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for "foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks."
Sutskever's departure and new AI venture
Sutskever had left OpenAI in May, soon after the board voted to fire Altman on November 17, 2023 over his lack of transparency in communications. Although he had initially backed the decision, Sutskever later regretted it and joined others in pushing for Altman's return. After leaving OpenAI, Sutskever launched a new AI firm called Safe Superintelligence Inc. The start-up, creating "safe" AI systems that outperform human abilities, raised $1 billion in September from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and others.
