Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever is a computer scientist whose research helped establish several foundations of modern deep learning. He studied at the University of Toronto and completed his doctorate under Geoffrey Hinton. His early work explored how neural networks could learn useful representations and solve tasks that had previously depended heavily on manually designed features.

In 2012, Sutskever co-authored the AlexNet work with Alex Krizhevsky and Hinton. Its success on the ImageNet competition became a major demonstration of deep convolutional networks trained with GPU computing. At Google, he later co-authored Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks, showing how neural models could map input sequences to output sequences for tasks such as translation.

Sutskever became a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015 and served as its chief scientist. His role connected fundamental research with the development of increasingly large and capable models. The organization’s progress depended on many contributors, but his scientific leadership placed him among the researchers most closely associated with its early direction and subsequent deep-learning programs.

He left OpenAI in 2024 and co-founded Safe Superintelligence with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. The company describes its goal as building safe superintelligence through a focused research effort. Sutskever became its CEO in 2025, adding executive responsibility to a career that had previously centered on research and scientific leadership.