Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever was born in Russia and grew up in Israel before completing his PhD under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, where he co-authored the AlexNet paper in 2012 that demonstrated the superiority of deep convolutional neural networks for image recognition and is widely credited with igniting the modern deep learning era. He joined Google Brain after completing his doctorate and became one of the most respected AI researchers in the world before leaving to co-found OpenAI in 2015 as Chief Scientist.

Ilya Sutskever was the intellectual engine of OpenAI's research agenda from its founding through his departure in May 2024. As Chief Scientist, he oversaw the development of the GPT series, InstructGPT, DALL-E, and the reinforcement learning from human feedback methodology that transformed GPT-3 into ChatGPT. Sutskever was also the primary architect of the safety-focused research agenda that made OpenAI distinctive within the AI research community — a commitment to alignment and interpretability research that ran alongside, and sometimes in tension with, the organization's commercial imperatives. In November 2023, Sutskever was among the board members who voted to fire Sam Altman — a decision he publicly expressed regret about the following day, signing the employee letter demanding Altman's reinstatement. Sutskever departed OpenAI in May 2024 to found the safety-focused AI startup Safe Superintelligence Inc. With former OpenAI researcher Daniel Gross and Jan Leike's colleague Daniel Levy.