Founder Profile
Ilya Sutskever
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Ilya Sutskever?
Ilya Sutskever is a founder of OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 with Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Greg Brockman.
- Company founded
- OpenAI
- Founded
- 2015
- Co-founders
- Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Greg Brockman
Background
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.
Founding Story
Ilya Sutskever was OpenAI's chief scientist from 2015 to May 2024, overseeing work behind the GPT series and ChatGPT. He voted to remove Sam Altman in November 2023, then said he regretted it. After leaving OpenAI he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy.
Ilya Sutskever was born in 1986 in Nizhny Novgorod. Education: Stanford University; Open University of Israel.