Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever is a computer scientist with Canadian, Israeli, and Russian roots. He co-founded OpenAI and previously served as its Chief Scientist, contributing to the organization's mission of advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of society.

Renowned for his deep learning expertise, Sutskever played a key role in the development of AlexNet alongside Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton. This convolutional neural network revolutionized computer vision after winning the 2012 ImageNet competition. He also made significant contributions to sequence-to-sequence learning, a breakthrough that has shaped machine translation and speech recognition.

His achievements have earned him several accolades, including his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021. As one of the six board members overseeing OpenAI’s non-profit entity, he was involved in a major leadership decision in November 2023, which resulted in the removal of Sam Altman as CEO. Following the controversy surrounding this decision, Altman was reinstated within a week, and Sutskever subsequently stepped down from the board.

In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a new endeavor. He later revealed the launch of Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a company founded alongside Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. With locations in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, SSI is dedicated solely to developing superintelligent AI with a strong emphasis on safety, free from commercial distractions. By September 2024, the company had secured $1 billion in funding from notable investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel, underscoring the growing interest in AI safety.

Sutskever remains deeply committed to ensuring that AI advancements align with ethical and safety considerations, distinguishing his approach from the more commercially oriented strategies often seen in the tech industry.