# Ilya Sutskever

> Ilya Sutskever is a co-creator of AlexNet, the 2012 deep learning breakthrough that launched the modern AI era, and a co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI. After a dramatic board vote to remove Sam Altman in November 2023, he departed OpenAI in 2024 and co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) — a $32B company with roughly 50 employees and a single stated mission: build artificial general superintelligence that is provably safe, with no commercial products until that goal is achieved.

- **Role:** CEO at Safe Superintelligence Inc.
- **Organizations:** Safe Superintelligence Inc., OpenAI, Google Brain, DNNResearch, University of Toronto, Royal Society
- **From:** Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), Russia
- **Nationality:** Israeli-Canadian
- **Education:** B.Sc. Mathematics, University of Toronto, M.Sc. Computer Science, University of Toronto, Ph.D. Computer Science (advisor: Geoffrey Hinton), University of Toronto
- **Known for:** Co-created AlexNet (2012) — 100,000+ citations, one of the most referenced papers in computer science history, Co-authored sequence-to-sequence learning paper (2014), foundational to Google Translate and modern NLP, Co-founded OpenAI (2015) and served as Chief Scientist for nine years

## Career timeline

- **2012** — Co-created AlexNet with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. Won ImageNet ILSVRC-2012, cutting the top-5 error rate from 26% to 15% and igniting the modern deep learning era.
- **2013** — Google acquired DNNResearch, the company spun out of Hinton's lab. Sutskever joined Google Brain as a Research Scientist, contributing to sequence-to-sequence learning and AlphaGo research.
- **2014** — Co-authored the sequence-to-sequence learning paper, which became the architectural backbone of Google Translate and modern NLP systems.
- **2015** — Co-founded OpenAI as Chief Scientist alongside Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman.
- **2020** — GPT-3 published, demonstrating emergent capabilities at scale and validating the scaling hypothesis Sutskever championed.
- **2022** — Elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Tweeted that 'today's large neural networks are slightly conscious,' sparking global debate.
- **2023** — Voted to remove Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO in November; publicly regretted the decision within 72 hours as staff revolted and Altman was reinstated.
- **2024** — Departed OpenAI. Co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. on June 19 with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. SSI raised $1B from Sequoia, a16z, DST Global, and SV Angel within four months.
- **2025** — SSI raised an additional $2B (April), reaching a $32B valuation. Google Cloud partnership secured for TPU access. Co-founder Daniel Gross departed for Meta. Sutskever became CEO. Declined Meta's acquisition approach. Received honorary doctorate from University of Toronto.
- **2026** — Became the first AI researcher to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award for Industrial Application of Science.

## Achievements

- Co-created AlexNet (2012) — 100,000+ citations, one of the most referenced papers in computer science history
- Co-authored sequence-to-sequence learning paper (2014), foundational to Google Translate and modern NLP
- Co-founded OpenAI (2015) and served as Chief Scientist for nine years
- Oversaw GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4, DALL-E, CLIP, Codex, and ChatGPT at OpenAI
- 795,000+ Google Scholar citations; h-index of 75; 151+ publications
- Elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2022
- NeurIPS Test of Time Award — three consecutive years: 2022, 2023, 2024
- Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People in AI — 2023 and 2024
- MIT Technology Review '35 Under 35' — 2015
- Honorary Doctorate, University of Toronto — 2025
- National Academy of Sciences Award for Industrial Application of Science — 2026 (first AI researcher to receive this honor)
- Co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc., valued at $32B with ~50 employees and $3B total raised

## Latest updates

- **2026-01** — Received the National Academy of Sciences Award for Industrial Application of Science — the first AI researcher ever to receive this honor.
- **2025-07** — Co-founder Daniel Gross departed SSI for Meta. Sutskever assumed the role of CEO.
- **2025-07** — SSI declined Meta's acquisition approach. The company is reported as not for sale.
- **2025-04** — SSI raised an additional $2B in funding, pushing valuation to $32B. Google Cloud partnership announced for TPU access.
- **2025-01** — Received honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto.
- **2024-09** — SSI raised $1B from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and SV Angel — just months after founding.
- **2024-06** — Co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy on June 19, 2024.

## Links

- Website: https://ssi.inc
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilya-sutskever/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/ilyasut
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ilyasu2/

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/ilya-sutskever
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-04