After OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman was fired by the company’s board of directors, Ilya Sutskever wrote on X: “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
Sutskever, a Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist, co-founded OpenAI and is a board member.
Sutskever’s comment has generated more than 25 million views on the social media network, including a view by the X owner Elon Musk, who has often warned on AI’s potential dangers and who served as one of the original board members of OpenAI.
Musk asked Sutskever: “Why did you take such a drastic action? if OpenAI is doing something potentially dangerous to humanity, the world needs to know.”
Why did you take such a drastic action?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 21, 2023
If OpenAI is doing something potentially dangerous to humanity, the world needs to know.
[NOTE: In 2014, Musk told a gathering at MIT: “With artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he’s like… Yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.”
Note: OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Sutskever, former president and board chair Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, Musk and Altman, with the latter two comprising the initial board of directors.
Vanity Fair featured Musk and Altman in a 2015 article titled Sam Altman on His Plan to Keep A.I. Out of the Hands of the ‘Bad Guys‘ with the subtitle ‘Two of Silicon Valley’s biggest power players are launching a nonprofit company to save the world from a dystopian future.’
