Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever (Hebrew: איליה סוצקבר; born 1986) is a Soviet-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who specializes in machine learning.[4] He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning, including sequence-to-sequence learning, reasoning models, GPT models, and contributions to CLIP, DALL-E, and AlphaGo.[5] With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-created AlexNet, a convolutional neural network.[6] One of the most highly cited computer scientists in history, he has won the NeurIPS Test of Time Award for his lasting impact on AI research three times in a row (2022–2024) and received the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science in 2026.[7][1] Sutskever co-founded OpenAI, where he served as chief scientist, overseeing the research breakthroughs that led to large language models and the launch of ChatGPT.[8][5] He also led the research that led to reasoning models such as o1.[5][9][10] In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board that ousted Sam Altman as its CEO; Altman was reinstated a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded the company Safe Superintelligence Inc., alongside Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy.[11][12] Within a year, the company was valued at more than $30 billion.[13] Sutskever was born in 1986[14] to a Russian-Jewish family[15] in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (then Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union).[16][17] At the age of 5, he immigrated to Israel with his family and grew up in Jerusalem.[18][19] Sutskever proved to be a good student in school, and in eighth grade started taking classes at the Open University of Israel.[20][21] At 16, he moved with his family to Canada, where he attended high school for a month before being admitted to the University of Toronto in Ontario as a third-year undergraduate student at University College.[22][23][24][25] At the University of Toronto, Sutskever received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in