Profile

Ilya Sutskever was born in the Soviet Union in 1986. As a child he moved with his family to Israel and later to Canada. He completed his undergraduate and doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, where his PhD advisor was Geoffrey Hinton.

After his PhD he spent a short time as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford, then joined DNNresearch, the company Hinton had started with his students. When Google acquired it in 2013, he moved to Google Brain. In 2015 he co-founded OpenAI and became its chief scientist. He left OpenAI in May 2024 and in June co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. After Gross left in July 2025, Sutskever became SSI’s CEO.

Key contributions

Sutskever’s work spans many of the key turning points from the rise of deep learning to the era of large models.

During his PhD in Toronto he studied how to train recurrent neural networks and how optimisation techniques such as momentum affect the training of deep networks. In 2012 he, Alex Krizhevsky and Hinton built AlexNet, whose ImageNet breakthrough began deep learning’s dominance in computer vision.

At Google he and collaborators introduced sequence-to-sequence learning (Seq2Seq), which maps one sequence directly to another with neural networks and laid groundwork for neural machine translation. He also contributed to the AlphaGo paper and to TensorFlow.

At OpenAI he set the research direction and was one of the central figures behind the GPT models. His long-held conviction that scaling up models and data would keep unlocking new capabilities shaped the whole large-model approach.

Notable work

  • AlexNet (2012), the landmark result of the deep learning era.
  • Sequence-to-sequence learning (2014), a foundational framework for neural machine translation and many generation tasks.
  • As OpenAI’s chief scientist, helping lead research on the GPT series and ChatGPT.
  • Co-leading OpenAI’s Superalignment team with Jan Leike in 2023, studying how to keep AI systems far more capable than humans under control.

Honours

  • Elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2022.

Influence

Sutskever is regarded as one of the most influential deep learning researchers of his generation. From AlexNet to GPT, he took part in nearly every major leap in the field’s history.

In November 2023, as a member of OpenAI’s board, he took part in the decision to remove CEO Sam Altman, then said publicly a few days later that he regretted it, and Altman returned. The episode exposed deep disagreements inside frontier AI companies over speed and safety.

When he founded SSI, he stated that the company has one goal and one product, safe superintelligence, insulated from short-term commercial pressure. Whether or not that path succeeds, he speaks for a clear position: in the push for more capable AI, safety has to matter as much as capability.