Ilya Sutskever (Hebrew: איליה סוצקבר; born 1986) is a Soviet-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist specializing in machine learning. He has made major contributions to Deep learning, including Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) learning, reasoning models, and GPT models, and contributed to CLIP, DALL-E, and AlphaGo. With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-created AlexNet, a convolutional neural network that revolutionized computer vision. One of the most highly cited computer scientists in history, he won the NeurIPS Test of Time Award three times in a row (2022–2024) and received the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science in 2026.
Sutskever co-founded OpenAI, where he served as chief scientist, overseeing research breakthroughs that led to large language models and the launch of ChatGPT. He also led research that produced reasoning models such as o1. In 2023, he was part of the OpenAI board that ousted Sam Altman as CEO; Altman was reinstated a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, which reached a valuation of over $30 billion within a year.
Early life and education
Sutskever was born in 1986 into a Jewish family in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (then Gorky, Soviet Union). At age 5, he immigrated to Israel with his family and grew up in Jerusalem. He excelled in school and began taking courses at the Open University of Israel in eighth grade. At 16, he moved with his family to Canada, attended high school for a month, and was admitted to the University of Toronto as a third-year undergraduate.
At the University of Toronto, Sutskever earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2005, a master's in computer science in 2007, and a PhD in computer science in 2013, advised by Geoffrey Hinton. In 2012, he built AlexNet with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky, a neural network that won the ImageNet competition and sparked the modern deep learning boom.
Career at Google Brain
In 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then joined Hinton's research company DNNResearch, which was acquired by Google in 2013, making him a research scientist at Google Brain. There, he worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm, a foundational technique for machine learning translation and summarization. He also contributed to TensorFlow and was a co-author on the AlphaGo paper.
OpenAI and ChatGPT
At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI. He played a key role in developing generative AI models, including GPT series, and established OpenAI's scaling ethos - the idea that larger models with more data and compute lead to better performance. In 2022, he tweeted that "today's large neural networks are slightly conscious," sparking debates about AI consciousness. He led research that resulted in ChatGPT and later reasoning models like o1.
In 2023, Sutskever announced he would co-lead OpenAI's "Superalignment" project, aiming to solve alignment of superintelligences within four years, writing that superintelligence could arrive this decade.
Board conflict and departure
Sutskever was one of six board members of OpenAI's nonprofit controlling entity. In November 2023, the board fired Sam Altman, citing lack of candor. Sutskever authored a 52-page memo, based on information from Mira Murati, accusing Altman of lying and manipulating executives. He voted for Altman's termination but expressed regret a week later. Altman was reinstated, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. He was absent from OpenAI's office, with some sources saying he led teams remotely.
In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a "very personally meaningful" project. His decision followed internal debates about AI safety and direction. Jan Leike, co-leader of Superalignment, resigned hours later, citing erosion of safety culture.
Safe Superintelligence Inc.
In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. Unlike OpenAI, SSI focuses solely on safe superintelligence, with no revenue-generating products. In September 2024, SSI raised $1 billion from venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel. In March 2025, it raised $2 billion more, reaching a $32 billion valuation. In June 2025, SSI rejected a buyout offer from Meta Platforms. Sutskever became CEO after Gross left for Meta. In July 2026, Nvidia announced a $5 billion investment in SSI.
Awards and honors
Sutskever received numerous accolades: in 2015, MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35; in 2018, keynote at Nvidia Ntech and AI Frontiers Conference; in 2022, elected Fellow of the Royal Society; in 2023 and 2024, Time's 100 most influential people in AI; and in 2022, 2023, and 2024, the NeurIPS Test of Time Award. In 2025, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto.
Personal life and legacy
As of July 2026, Bloomberg estimated Sutskever's net worth at $13.8 billion, from a $7 billion OpenAI stake and $6.75 billion in SSI. His work has shaped modern AI, from AlexNet to ChatGPT, and his focus on safety continues through SSI. He remains a central figure in the field, balancing innovation with concerns about superintelligence.