OpenAI announced a leadership shuffle: co‑founder Ilya Sutskever is leaving, and Jakub Pachocki has been named chief scientist.
The change was disclosed in a brief blog post on May 14. Sutskever, who helped shape the company’s early research direction, will depart later this year. Pachocki, a long‑time engineer and author of key scaling papers, will take over the role, reporting directly to CEO Sam Altman.
The move could signal a shift toward more production‑focused AI work. Pachocki’s background in large‑scale model optimization may accelerate OpenAI’s push to commercialize newer versions of its models, while Sutskever’s exit removes a vocal advocate for open research.
In short, OpenAI swaps one veteran researcher for another, a change that may tighten its engineering pipeline and modestly steer its research agenda.