This is a post by Jesse Pujji. Jessi a serial entrepreneur that lives in the US. He has:
- Bootstrapped to an 8-figure exist with his previous startup, Ampush
- Is currently building GatewayX, a venture studio that he plans to bootstrap to $1B+
- Executive Chairman & Founder of GrowthAssistant.com
- ex-McKinsey Consultant
Guest Author: Jesse Pujji
Sam Altman is back as CEO of OpenAI.
But who’s Ilya Sutskever, the man who masterminded a boardroom coup against him?
Here’s the unlikely story of a brilliant scientist who plunged the world’s hottest startup into chaos 👇
1/ Born in Soviet Russia, he moved to Israel at the age of 5. After completing 2 years at the Open University of Israel, he transferred to the University of Toronto and eventually completed a BS in math and an MS in Computer Science in 2007.
2/ After graduation, he started a PhD under professor Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI”.
Over the next 5 years, Hinton, Ilya, and fellow PhD student Alex Krizhevsky began researching an overlooked area of machine learning: neural networks.
Things were going fine, but they could never have predicted what would happen next.
3/ In 2012, the team decided to put their years of research to the test by competing in the ILSVR Challenge, where competitors classify objects in an image dataset with 1,000 categories.
3/ Neural networks weren’t practical enough for real life use cases because they required a TON of compute power to train…but Hinton, Sutskever, and Krizhevsky got creative. They put together a model called AlexNet, but now they just needed the GPU horsepower to train it.
So Sutskever drove across the border from Toronto to New York to buy a trunk full of GTX 580s and got to work…
That trunk full of GPUs changed the world forever. AlexNet beat the competition by a long shot.
Nobody had seen anything like it. It was the big bang moment for AI…
4/ The research that produced AlexNet was so groundbreaking that Hinton scrambled to start a new company DNNResearch to commercialize it.
He recruited Ilya just before Google acquired them in March 2013, and Sutskever became a research scientist at Google Brain.
5/ At Google, Sutskever spent the majority of his time trying to apply the same image recognition technology to language.
But he didn’t stay at Google for long. In 2014, he was recruited to become a cofounder of OpenAI.
6/ With Sutskever on board, OpenAI could now recruit the best researchers in the world, and that’s exactly what they did.
7/ With a team of the best AI researchers in the world and $1 BILLION of fresh funding, the OpenAI team got to work.
Then, something magical happened. After years of grueling research, they hit the jackpot when they released ChatGPT.
8/ Within just two months of launch, ChatGPT had amassed 100 MILLION users. It became the fastest growing consumer internet app of ALL TIME.
8/ But that’s where things go wrong. Increasingly, Ilya became concerned with how dangerous ChatGPT could become if left alone.
SO concerned, that he headed OpenAI’s Superalignment team and dedicated 20% of the ENTIRE company’s compute power to make sure the system won’t harm humans.
9/ It’s rumored that the board coup Ilya led last weekend was the direct result of a disagreement about safety concerns w releasing a new OpenAI breakthrough to the public.
