Sebastian Bubeck Leaves Microsoft for OpenAI

Sebastian Bubeck, who has held various roles at Microsoft for over a decade, is making a significant career change. He is moving from the tech giant, where he served as vice-president of AI research, to join OpenAI, the company known for its popular AI product, ChatGPT.

The exact position that Bubeck will take at OpenAI has not yet been disclosed. Microsoft announced his departure on October 14, stating that Bubeck has chosen to pursue his passion for developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). In their statement, Microsoft expressed appreciation for Bubeck's contributions during his time with the company and indicated they look forward to maintaining a relationship as he works with OpenAI.

Bubeck's Impact at Microsoft

During his tenure at Microsoft, Bubeck was a key player in advancing the company's artificial intelligence projects. One of his notable contributions was leading the creation of the Phi small language models (SLMs). These models aim to achieve almost the same effectiveness as larger language models but with significantly lower compute requirements.

Earlier in the year, Microsoft introduced the Phi-3 suite of models, labeling them as the most capable and cost-efficient small language models on the market. At the announcement event for Phi-3, Bubeck shared his philosophy about high-quality data, questioning, "Instead of training on just raw web data, why don’t you look for data which is of extremely high quality?" This reflects his commitment to enhancing AI efficiency.

Shifts in OpenAI's Leadership

Bubeck's transition to OpenAI occurs amid several leadership changes within the organization. Recently, several key executives—including Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, Research Vice-President Barret Zoph, and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew—have stepped down. These departures coincided with OpenAI's announcement of a shift from a non-profit to a for-profit model.

Earlier in the year, notable figures from OpenAI, such as co-founder John Schulman and former executive Jan Leike, also exited to join Anthropic, another AI firm. Additionally, Ilya Sutskever, one of the company's co-founders, left in May to start his own AI safety-focused venture. Andrej Karpathy, another co-founder, departed in February to pursue an AI education startup.

This period of change opens up many questions about the future direction of OpenAI and how Bubeck’s expertise might influence its ongoing projects.

Bubeck, OpenAI, Microsoft