Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence Inc.; OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist from 2015 to 2024.
At a glance
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- Ilya Sutskever is a machine-learning researcher.
- With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton he built AlexNet in 2012; at Google Brain he co-created sequence-to-sequence learning.
- He co-founded OpenAI at the end of 2015 and was its chief scientist until May 2024.
- In November 2023 he was one of the board members who removed Sam Altman as CEO, then said he regretted it and left the board.
- In June 2024 he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, and became its CEO in 2025 after Gross left for Meta.
Key facts
- Current role
- Co-founder and CEO, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (CEO from mid-2025)1
- Born
- 1986, Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Soviet Union; grew up in Jerusalem, moved to Canada at 161
- Education
- University of Toronto: BSc in mathematics (2005), MSc (2007) and PhD (2013) in computer science, advised by Geoffrey Hinton1
- Google Brain
- Research scientist after Google bought DNNResearch, from 2013 to 20151
- OpenAI
- Co-founder and chief scientist, from 2015 to May 2024; board member until November 20231
- SSI
- Founded June 2024; offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv; one stated goal, a safe superintelligence2
- Honors
- Fellow of the Royal Society (2022); NeurIPS Test of Time award 2022, 2023 and 2024; National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science (2026)1
Roles
Leads
- Safe Superintelligence Inc.Organization
CEO · since Jul 2025 source on Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Before
Part of until 2015
Google (research scientist at Google Brain, 2013–2015, after Google bought DNNResearch) source on Google
Part of until May 2024
OpenAI (co-founder and chief scientist, 2015–2024; on the board until November 2023) source on OpenAI
Links
Sources
Last checked against its sources today
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