Biography:Ilya Sutskever

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Ilya Sutskever

FRS
איליה סוצקבר
Sutskever at Tel Aviv University in 2023
Born
Ilya Efimovich Sutskever

(1986-12-08) 8 December 1986 (age 39)
Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Russia)[1][2]
Citizenship
  • Israel
  • Canada
[3]
EducationOpen University of Israel
University of Toronto (BSc, MSc, PhD)
Known forAlexNet
Co-founding OpenAI
Founding SSI Inc.
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsUniversity of Toronto
Google Brain
OpenAI
ThesisTraining recurrent neural networks (2013)
Doctoral advisorGeoffrey Hinton[4][5]
Website{{{1}}}

Ilya Sutskever FRS (Hebrew: איליה סוצקבר; born 8 December 1986) is an Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who specializes in machine learning.[6] He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning.[7][8][9] With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-invented AlexNet, a convolutional neural network.[10]

Sutskever co-founded and was chief scientist at OpenAI.[11] In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board that ousted Sam Altman as its CEO; Altman was reinstated a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded the company Safe Superintelligence alongside Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy.[12][13]

Early life and education

Sutskever was born into a Jewish family[14] in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (then Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union). At the age of 5, he made aliyah with his family and lived in Jerusalem[15][16] until he was 16, when his family moved to Canada.[17] Sutskever attended the Open University of Israel from 2000 to 2002.[18] After moving to Canada, he attended the University of Toronto in Ontario.[18]

At the University of Toronto, Sutskever received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2005,[18][19][2][20] a master's degree in computer science in 2007,[19][21] and a PhD in computer science in 2013.[5][22][23] His doctoral advisor was Geoffrey Hinton.[4]

In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky.[24]

Career and research

In 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to the University of Toronto and joined Hinton's new research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton's research group. In 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain.[25]

At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm,[26] and worked on TensorFlow.[27] He is also one of the AlphaGo paper's many co-authors.[28]

At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.[29][30][31]

In 2022, Sutskever tweeted, "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious", which triggered debates about AI consciousness.[32][33] He is considered to have played a key role in the development of ChatGPT.[34][35] In 2023, he announced that he would co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which is trying to solve the alignment of superintelligences within four years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade.[36]

Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI.[37] In November 2023, the board fired Sam Altman, saying that "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board".[38] The Information speculated that the decision was partly driven by conflict over the extent to which the company should commit to AI safety.[39] In an all-hands company meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever said that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty",[40] but the next week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ouster.[41] Altman's firing and OpenAI's co-founder Greg Brockman's resignation led three senior researchers to resign from OpenAI.[42] After that, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board[43] and was absent from OpenAI's office. Some sources suggested he was leading the team remotely, while others said he no longer had access to the team's work.[44]

In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a new project that was "very personally meaningful" to him. His decision followed a turbulent period at OpenAI marked by leadership crises and internal debates about the direction of AI development and alignment protocols. Jan Leike, the other leader of the superalignment project, announced his departure hours later, citing an erosion of safety and trust in OpenAI's leadership.[45]

In June 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc., a new company he founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.[46] In contrast to OpenAI, which releases revenue-generating products, Sutskever said the new company's "first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then".[13] In September 2024, the company announced that it had raised $1 billion from venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel.[47] In March 2025, Safe Superintelligence Inc. raised $2 billion more and reportedly reached a $32 billion valuation, notably due to Sutskever's reputation.[48][49]

In an October 2024 interview after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton expressed support for Sutskever's decision to fire Altman, emphasizing concerns about AI safety.[50][51]

Awards and honors

  • In 2015, Sutskever was named in MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35.[52]
  • In 2018, he was the keynote speaker at Nvidia Ntech 2018[53] and AI Frontiers Conference 2018.[54]
  • In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).[26]
  • In 2023[55] and 2024,[56] included in Time's list of the 100 most influential people in AI
  • In 2025, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Toronto[57]

References

  1. ↑ "Heard It Through the AI | University of Toronto Magazine" (in en-US). 28 September 2022. https://magazine.utoronto.ca/people/alumni-donors/heard-it-through-the-ai-openai-ilya-sutskever/. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Season 1 Ep. 22 Ilya Sutskever". The Robot Brains Podcast. 21 September 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCoavgGZ64Y. 
  3. ↑ "OpenAI's Israeli co-founder departs as US gears up regulation". Jewish News Syndicate. May 17, 2024. https://www.jns.org/edited-hold-fri-openais-israeli-co-founder-departs-as-us-gears-up-regulation/. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Ilya Sutskever at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Sutskever, Ilya (2013). Training Recurrent Neural Networks. utoronto.ca (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. hdl:1807/36012. OCLC 889910425. ProQuest 1501655550. Archived from the original on 26 March 2023. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  6. ↑ {{Google Scholar id}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  7. ↑ Krizhevsky, Alex; Sutskever, Ilya; Hinton, Geoffrey E (2012). "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Curran Associates, Inc.) 25. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436e924a68c45b-Abstract.html. 
  8. ↑ Srivastava, Nitish; Hinton, Geoffrey; Krizhevsky, Alex; Sutskever, Ilya; Salakhutdinov, Ruslan (2014). "Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting". Journal of Machine Learning Research 15 (56): 1929–1958. ISSN 1533-7928. http://jmlr.org/papers/v15/srivastava14a.html. 
  9. ↑ Sutskever, Ilya; Vinyals, Oriol; Le, Quoc V. (2014-12-08). "Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks". Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems - Volume 2. NIPS'14 (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press) 2: 3104–3112. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2969033.2969173. 
  10. ↑  , Wikidata Q59445836
  11. ↑ Metz, Cade (19 April 2018). "A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit" (in en). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-salaries-openai.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer. 
  12. ↑ "Safe Superintelligence Inc.". 19 June 2024. https://ssi.inc/. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Vance, Ashlee (19 June 2024). "Ilya Sutskever Has a New Plan for Safe Superintelligence". https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-19/openai-co-founder-plans-new-ai-focused-research-lab. 
  14. ↑ Titcomb, James (16 May 2024). "How ChatGPT's Russian-born genius sealed his fate after a shocking coup". The Daily Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/16/russian-born-genius-chatgpt-openai-failed-coup-sam-altman. 
  15. ↑ מן, יובל (2022-11-18). ""הבינה המלאכותית מהמדע הבדיוני תהפוך למציאות"" (in he). Ynet. https://www.ynet.co.il/digital/technology/article/h1ebvhxuj. 
  16. ↑ Wrobel, Sharon (20 June 2024). "OpenAI co-founder creates a new AI startup with a research lab in Tel Aviv". https://www.timesofisrael.com/openai-co-founder-creates-a-new-ai-startup-with-a-research-lab-in-tel-aviv. 
  17. ↑ Ansari, Tasmia (2023-03-07). "The Brain That Supercharged ChatGPT, ImageNet and TF" (in en-US). https://analyticsindiamag.com/the-brain-that-supercharged-chatgpt-imagenet-tensorflow/. 
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 "Neural networking". 25 October 2010. https://thevarsity.ca/2010/10/25/neural-networking/. 
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Johnston, Jessica Leigh (8 December 2010). "A Neural Network for a New Millennium". https://magazine.utoronto.ca/people/students/ilya-sutskever-google-phd-fellowship/. 
  20. ↑ {{LinkedIn page}} template missing URL and not present in Wikidata.
  21. ↑ Sutskever, Ilya (2007). Nonlinear multilayered sequence models. utoronto.ca (MSc thesis). University of Toronto. hdl:1807/119676. OCLC 234120052. Archived from the original on 24 March 2023. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  22. ↑ "RAM Workshop". http://www.thespermwhale.com/jaseweston/ram/. 
  23. ↑ "Episode 85: A Conversation with Ilya Sutskever". Gigaom. https://voicesinai.com/episode/episode-85-a-conversation-with-ilya-sutskever/. 
  24. ↑ "Exclusive: Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, on his hopes and fears for the future of AI" (in en). https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/26/1082398/exclusive-ilya-sutskever-openais-chief-scientist-on-his-hopes-and-fears-for-the-future-of-ai/. 
  25. ↑ McMillan, Robert (13 March 2013). "Google Hires Brains that Helped Supercharge Machine Learning". https://www.wired.com/2013/03/google_hinton/. 
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Anon (2022). "Ilya Sutskever". London: Royal Society. https://royalsociety.org/people/ilya-sutskever-35834/. 
  27. ↑  , Wikidata Q29040034
  28. ↑  , Wikidata Q28005460
  29. ↑ "OpenAI Blog". 12 December 2015. https://www.openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/. 
  30. ↑ {{{1}}}
  31. ↑ Metz, Cade (27 April 2016). "Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free". https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-plan-to-set-artificial-intelligence-free/. 
  32. ↑ "Scientists warn new AI may be 'slightly conscious'" (in en). 2022-02-18. https://www.the-independent.com/tech/artificial-intelligence-conciousness-ai-deepmind-b2017393.html. 
  33. ↑ "OpenAI Chief Scientist Says Advanced AI May Already Be Conscious". 2022-02-13. https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-already-sentient. 
  34. ↑ Ansari, Tasmia (2023-03-07). "The Brain That Supercharged ChatGPT, ImageNet and TF" (in en-US). https://analyticsindiamag.com/the-brain-that-supercharged-chatgpt-imagenet-tensorflow/. 
  35. ↑ Heaven, Will Douglas (May 2, 2023). "Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he's now scared of the tech he helped build" (in en). https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai/. 
  36. ↑ "Introducing Superalignment" (in en-US). https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment. 
  37. ↑ "Our structure". https://openai.com/our-structure. "OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, composed of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner." 
  38. ↑ Metz, Cade (November 17, 2023). "OpenAI's Board Pushes Out Sam Altman, Its High-Profile C.E.O.". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/technology/openai-sam-altman-ousted.html. 
  39. ↑ "Before OpenAI Ousted Altman, Employees Disagreed Over AI 'Safety'". https://www.theinformation.com/articles/before-openai-ousted-altman-employees-disagreed-over-ai-safety. 
  40. ↑ Edwards, Benj (2023-11-18). "Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI". https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/report-sutskever-led-board-coup-at-openai-that-ousted-altman-over-ai-safety-concerns/. 
  41. ↑ Rosenberg, Scott (2023-11-20). "OpenAI's Sutskever says he regrets board's firing of Altman". Axios. https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/sam-altman-fired-openai-board-illya-sutsever-regrets. 
  42. ↑ Thompson, Polly. "3 senior OpenAI researchers resign in the wake of Sam Altman's shock dismissal as CEO, report says" (in en-US). https://www.businessinsider.com/3-open-ai-researchers-resign-sam-altman-dismissal-ceo-2023-11. 
  43. ↑ "OpenAI announces return of Sam Altman as CEO.". X (formerly Twitter). 22 November 2023. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1727206187077370115?s=20. 
  44. ↑ Kahn, Jeremy (May 21, 2024). "OpenAI promised 20% of its computing power to combat the most dangerous kind of AI—but never delivered, sources say" (in en). https://fortune.com/2024/05/21/openai-superalignment-20-compute-commitment-never-fulfilled-sutskever-leike-altman-brockman-murati/. 
  45. ↑ Samuel, Sigal (2024-05-17). ""I lost trust": Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded" (in en). https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligence. 
  46. ↑ Tabassum, Juveria (June 19, 2024). "Former OpenAI chief scientist to start a new AI company". Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/former-openai-chief-scientist-start-new-ai-company-2024-06-19/. 
  47. ↑ Kai, Kenrick; Hu, Krystal; Tong, Anna (4 September 2024). "OpenAI co-founder Sutskever's new safety-focused AI startup SSI raises $1 billion". https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-co-founder-sutskevers-new-safety-focused-ai-startup-ssi-raises-1-billion-2024-09-04/. 
  48. ↑ Jin, Berber; Seetharaman, Deepa (March 4, 2025). "This Scientist Left OpenAI Last Year. His Startup Is Already Worth $30 Billion." (in en-US). https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-safe-superintelligence-startup-ilya-sutskever-openai-2335259b. 
  49. ↑ Ha, Anthony (2025-04-12). "OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence reportedly valued at $32B" (in en-US). https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/openai-co-founder-ilya-sutskevers-safe-superintelligence-reportedly-valued-at-32b/. 
  50. ↑ Hetzner, Christiaan. "New Nobel Prize winner, AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton, says he's proud his student fired OpenAI boss Sam Altman" (in en). https://fortune.com/2024/10/09/openai-sam-altman-geoffrey-hinton-nobel-prize-physics-ilya-sutskever-toronto/. 
  51. ↑ Tan, Kwan Wei Kevin. "The Nobel Prize-winning 'godfather of AI' says he's glad one of his students had a hand in ousting Sam Altman from OpenAI" (in en-US). https://www.businessinsider.com/geoffrey-hinton-proud-student-fired-sam-altman-openai-2024-10. 
  52. ↑ "35 Innovators Under 35: Ilya Sutskever". https://www.technologyreview.com/lists/innovators-under-35/2015/visionary/ilya-sutskever/. 
  53. ↑ Martin, Scott (15 September 2018). "Reinforcement Learning 'Really Works' for AI Against Pro Gamers, OpenAI Trailblazer Says". Nvidia. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/09/14/reinforcement-learning-openai-pro-gamers-ilya-sutskeverai-elon-musk-gpu-dgx/. 
  54. ↑ "The man who revolutionized computer vision, machine translation, games and robotics · AI Frontiers Conference". https://aifrontiers.com/2018/08/29/the-journey-of-openais-founder-ilya-sutskever-s-story/. 
  55. ↑ Perrigo, Billy (2023-09-07). "TIME100 AI 2023: Ilya Sutskever" (in en). Time. https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309011/ilya-sutskever/. Retrieved 2025-03-09. 
  56. ↑ Perrigo, Billy (2024-09-05). "TIME100 AI 2024: Ilya Sutskever" (in en). Time. https://time.com/7012869/ilya-sutskever-2/. Retrieved 2025-03-09. 
  57. ↑ "Ilya Sutskever, a leader in AI and its responsible development, receives U of T honorary degree". 2025-06-06. https://www.utoronto.ca/news/ilya-sutskever-leader-ai-and-its-responsible-development-receives-u-t-honorary-degree. 

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