Sutskever co-founded and is a former chief scientist at OpenAI.[11] In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board who fired CEO Sam Altman; Altman returned a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded Safe Superintelligence with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy.[12][13]
Sutskever was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, then called Gorky, at the time part of the Soviet Union, and at age 5 emigrated with his family to Israel,[14] where he lived until age 15.[15]
In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. To support AlexNet's computing demands, he bought many GTX 580 GPUs online.[22]
Sutskever (second from right) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2014
In 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew NgatStanford University. He then returned to the University of Toronto and joined Hinton's new 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.[23]
At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.[27][28][29]
Sutskever is considered to have played a key role in the development of ChatGPT.[30][31] In 2023, he announced that he would co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which is trying to solve the alignmentofsuperintelligences within four years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade.[32]
Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI.[33]The Information speculated that Sam Altman's firing resulted in part from a conflict over the extent to which the company should commit to AI safety.[34] In an all-hands company meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever said that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty",[35] but the next week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ouster.[36] Altman's firing and Brockman's resignation led three senior researchers to resign from OpenAI.[37] After that, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board.[38] Since then, he has been 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 and could not lead it.[39]
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 safety 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.[40]
In June 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc., a new company he founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv[41]. 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".[13]
^Sutskever, Ilya; Vinyals, Oriol; Le, Quoc V. (8 December 2014). "Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks". Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems - Volume 2. NIPS'14. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press: 3104–3112. arXiv:1409.3215.
^"Our structure". Archived from the original on 29 July 2023. Retrieved 20 November 2023. OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, composed of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.
