Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever (איליה סוצקבר; Илья́ Суцке́вер born 1985/86) is a Russian-Canadian-Israeli computer scientist working in machine learning.

Sutskever is a co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI.

He holds citizenships in Russia, Israel, and Canada.

He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning.

In 2023, Sutskever was one of the members of the OpenAI board who fired CEO Sam Altman; Altman returned a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board.

He is the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network.

Sutskever is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper.

Sutskever was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, then called Gorky, at the time part of the Soviet Union, and at age 5 immigrated with his family to Israel, where he lived until age 15.

Sutskever attended the Open University of Israel between 2000 and 2002.

After that, he moved to Canada with his family and attended the University of Toronto in Ontario.

From the University of Toronto, Sutskever received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics in 2005, a Master of Science in computer science in 2007, and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 2013.

His doctoral supervisor was Geoffrey Hinton.

In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky.

To support the computing demands of AlexNet, Sutskever bought many GTX 580 GPUs online.

From November to December 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 new research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton's research group.

Four months later, in March 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.

At the end of 2015, he left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.

In 2023, he announced that he will co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which tries to solve the alignment of superintelligences in 4 years.

He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade.

Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the non-profit entity which controls OpenAI.

The Information speculated that the firing of Sam Altman in part resulted from a conflict over the extent to which the company should commit to AI safety.

In a company all-hands meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever stated that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty", though in the following week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ousting.

The firing of Altman and resignation of Brockman led to resignation of three senior researchers from OpenAI.

Following these events, Sutskever stepped down from the board of OpenAI.