Ilya Sutskever
Deep Learning · Sequence Modeling · AI Safety · b. 1986 · Israeli-Canadian
Co-inventor of AlexNet and Seq2Seq, co-founder of OpenAI, and now founder of a single-product superintelligence-safety lab.
Biography
Sutskever was Hinton's student and a co-author on AlexNet, then invented sequence-to-sequence learning at Google Brain. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and architected the research path that led to GPT-3 and GPT-4. After the November 2023 OpenAI board crisis, he departed in 2024 and founded Safe Superintelligence Inc., a single-product lab focused exclusively on building safe superintelligence.
Affiliations
Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist · 2024–present
OpenAI
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist · 2015–2024
Major contributions
AlexNet
Co-author of the 2012 ImageNet-winning convolutional network.
Sequence-to-Sequence Learning
Showed encoder-decoder neural networks could perform translation and reasoning.
GPT line architecture
Drove OpenAI's bet on scaling autoregressive transformers.
Superalignment
Co-led OpenAI's superalignment team before departure.
Major works
ImageNet Classification with Deep CNNs
NeurIPS · 2012
- Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks
NeurIPS · 2014
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3)
NeurIPS · 2020
Awards & honors
- MIT Technology Review TR35 · 2015
- ACM Prize in Computing (with Krizhevsky) · 2023
Intellectual lineage
Influences
- Geoffrey Hinton
- Alex Krizhevsky
Influenced
- Andrej Karpathy
- Jakub Pachocki
Timeline
2012
AlexNet wins ImageNet.
2014
Joined Google Brain; published Seq2Seq.
2015
Co-founded OpenAI as Chief Scientist.
2023
Voted to remove Sam Altman; reversed days later.
2024
Departed OpenAI; co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Notable positions
- Superintelligence is plausible this decade.
- Capability and safety must scale together.
- Building safe superintelligence is the only product worth pursuing.
Related entities
Other scientists
Geoffrey Hinton
The 'Godfather of Deep Learning' whose backpropagation work made modern neural networks possible - and who left Google in 2023 to warn about AI risks.
Open profile
Yann LeCun
Architect of convolutional networks and Meta's chief AI scientist - the field's loudest skeptic of LLM-only paths to general intelligence.
Open profile
Yoshua Bengio
Deep-learning pioneer who pivoted his career toward AI safety governance after the rise of GPT-class models.
Open profile
Demis Hassabis
Neuroscientist turned chess prodigy turned CEO of Google DeepMind - driving AI from games (AlphaGo) to protein folding (AlphaFold) toward AGI.
Open profile
Fei-Fei Li
Creator of ImageNet - the dataset that catalyzed the deep-learning revolution - and a leading voice for human-centered AI.
Open profile
Dario Amodei
Physicist turned AI-safety entrepreneur leading Anthropic's mission to build steerable, interpretable frontier models.
Open profile