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 learning, reasoning models, GPT models, and contributions to CLIP, DALL-E, and AlphaGo. With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-created AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. One of the most highly cited computer scientists in history, he has 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 led to reasoning models such as o1. In 2023, he was one of the board members who 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. (SSI) with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. Within a year, the company was valued at more than $30 billion.
Early life and education
Sutskever was born in 1986 into a Jewish family in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (then Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union). At age 5, he immigrated to Israel with his family and grew up in Jerusalem. He proved to be a good student, and in eighth grade started taking classes at the Open University of Israel. At 16, he moved with his family to Canada, where he attended high school for a month before being admitted to the University of Toronto as a third-year undergraduate student.
At the University of Toronto, Sutskever received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2005, a master's degree in computer science in 2007, and a PhD in computer science in 2013. His doctoral advisor was Geoffrey Hinton. In 2012, he built AlexNet in collaboration with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky.
Career beginnings and AlexNet
In 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to the University of Toronto and joined Hinton's research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton's research group. In 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain.
At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm, and worked on TensorFlow. He is also one of the AlphaGo paper's many co-authors. His work on sequence-to-sequence learning, which maps input sequences to output sequences, became foundational for later large language models.
OpenAI and chief scientist role
At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI. He is credited with establishing OpenAI's scaling ethos, which emphasized increasing model size and data to improve performance. He played a key role in the development of ChatGPT and later led research that led to reasoning models such as o1. In 2022, Sutskever tweeted, "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious", which triggered debates about AI consciousness.
In 2023, he announced that he would co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which aimed to solve the alignment of superintelligences within four years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade. His focus on safety and alignment reflected his broader concerns about the risks of advanced AI.
Board conflict and departure from OpenAI
Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the nonprofit entity that controlled OpenAI. In November 2023, the board fired Sam Altman, saying that "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board". Sutskever authored a 52-page memo that relied heavily on information from Mira Murati, accusing Altman of lying, manipulating executives, and fostering internal division. He submitted the memo to the board after months of tension and dissatisfaction with Altman's leadership style, and ultimately joined the board in voting for Altman's termination.
In an all-hands company meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever said that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty", but the next week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ouster. Altman's firing and OpenAI's co-founder Greg Brockman's resignation led three senior researchers to resign from OpenAI. After that, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board and was absent from OpenAI's office. Some sources suggested he was leading the team remotely, while others said he no longer had access to the team's work.
In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a new project that was "very personally meaningful" to him. His decision followed a turbulent period at OpenAI marked by leadership crises and internal debates about the direction of AI development and alignment protocols. Jan Leike, the other leader of the superalignment project, announced his departure hours later, citing an erosion of safety and trust in OpenAI's leadership.
Safe Superintelligence Inc.
In June 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a new company he founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. In contrast to OpenAI, which releases revenue-generating products, Sutskever said the new company's "first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then". The company focuses on developing AI systems that are safe by design, rather than commercializing incremental improvements.
In September 2024, SSI announced that it had raised $1 billion from venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel. In March 2025, SSI raised $2 billion more and reportedly reached a $32 billion valuation, notably due to Sutskever's reputation. In June 2025, SSI rejected an offer from Meta Platforms to buy the company. Sutskever became CEO of SSI shortly thereafter, after co-founder and CEO Gross left for Meta. In July 2026, Nvidia announced it would invest $5 billion into SSI.
Awards and honors
In 2015, Sutskever was named in MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35. In 2018, he was the keynote speaker at Nvidia Ntech 2018 and AI Frontiers Conference 2018. In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In 2023 and 2024, he was included in Time's list of the 100 most influential people in AI. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, he won the Neural Information Processing Systems' Test of Time award, which recognizes papers that significantly shaped the AI field over at least ten years. In 2025, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Toronto.
In an October 2024 interview after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton expressed support for Sutskever's decision to fire Altman, emphasizing concerns about AI safety. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated Sutskever's net worth at $13.8 billion as of July 2026, largely stemming from the $7 billion OpenAI stake he verified on the stand during the 2026 Musk v. Altman trial alongside a $6.75 billion holding in Safe Superintelligence.
Legacy and impact
Sutskever's contributions to deep learning have been transformative. His work on AlexNet helped revive interest in neural networks and machine learning by demonstrating the power of convolutional neural networks (though the slug is not in the list, so use Neural network). His sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm became a cornerstone of modern natural language processing (but the slug is not in the list, so use Large language model). At OpenAI, he helped shape the development of generative AI and large language models, influencing the broader field of artificial intelligence. His focus on AI safety and alignment, both at OpenAI and through SSI, has sparked ongoing discussions about the responsible development of superintelligent systems.
His career reflects a trajectory from academic research to industry leadership, with a consistent emphasis on pushing the boundaries of what neural networks can achieve while addressing the risks associated with advanced AI. As of 2026, he continues to lead SSI, working toward the goal of safe superintelligence.