Ilya Sutskever

Born in Russia and raised in Israel and Canada, Sutskever studied under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, where he co-authored AlexNet in 2012 — the result that ignited the deep learning era. At Google Brain he co-developed sequence-to-sequence learning, foundational to modern language models.

He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as chief scientist and shaped its core conviction that scaling neural networks would yield general intelligence, guiding the GPT series and co-leading the superalignment effort. He participated in the board’s brief removal of Sam Altman in November 2023, publicly expressed regret, and left OpenAI in May 2024.

Weeks later he founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with a stated strategy of pursuing safe superintelligence with no interim products. Despite shipping nothing publicly, SSI raised billions at one of the highest valuations ever accorded a pre-product company — a striking data point on how capital markets price pure AI research talent.