Ilya Sutskever
Deep-learning researcher who co-founded OpenAI and Safe Superintelligence
- Age
- 39 yrs
- Birthday in 33 days
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- 2
- Paper
- Honours
- 1
- Most recent 2022
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Ilya Sutskever is a Soviet-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who co-created AlexNet with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton and co-invented sequence-to-sequence learning. As OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist he led the research behind GPT models and ChatGPT. In 2024 he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Biography
Background
Sutskever was born in the Soviet Union, moved to Jerusalem at five and to Toronto as a teenager. He studied at the University of Toronto, earning his PhD under Geoffrey Hinton.
AlexNet and Google
In 2012, with Alex Krizhevsky and Hinton, he built AlexNet, whose ImageNet win launched the deep-learning era. At Google Brain he co-wrote the 2014 sequence-to-sequence paper that transformed machine translation and contributed to AlphaGo.
OpenAI
He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and as chief scientist oversaw the research leading to GPT models, ChatGPT and reasoning models such as o1. In November 2023 he joined the board vote to remove Sam Altman, then said he regretted it; he left OpenAI in May 2024.
Safe Superintelligence
In June 2024 he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, focused solely on building safe superintelligent AI. He has won the NeurIPS Test of Time Award three years running (2022–2024).
Timeline
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1986
Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Soviet Union
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2012
AlexNet
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2013
Joins Google Brain
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2014
Sequence-to-sequence learning paper
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2015
Co-founds OpenAI
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2022
ChatGPT launched
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2023
Board crisis at OpenAI
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2024
Leaves OpenAI; co-founds SSI
Notable works
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2012
ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Paper
With Krizhevsky and Hinton.
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2014
Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks Paper
With Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le.
Awards and honours
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Fellow of the Royal Society
2022
Did you know?
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1
He is one of the most cited computer scientists in history.
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2
SSI has said it will release no product until it achieves safe superintelligence.
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3
He was a student of both Hinton and Andrew Ng.
Connections
Related people
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Geoffrey Hinton
Science · “Godfather of AI” and Nobel laureate who made neural networks work
Doctoral adviser
- Alex Krizhevsky Science · Creator of AlexNet, the network that launched the deep-learning boom AlexNet co-creator
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Greg Brockman
Technology · Co-founder and president of OpenAI
OpenAI co-founder
Frequently asked
Who is Ilya Sutskever?
Ilya Sutskever is a Soviet-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who co-created AlexNet with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton and co-invented sequence-to-sequence learning. As OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist he led the research behind GPT models and ChatGPT. In 2024 he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc.
How old is Ilya Sutskever?
Ilya Sutskever is 39 years old, born on 8 December 1986 in Nizhny Novgorod, Soviet Union.
Where is Ilya Sutskever from?
Ilya Sutskever was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Soviet Union.
What is Ilya Sutskever known for?
Ilya Sutskever is best known for AlexNet; sequence-to-sequence learning; OpenAI chief scientist; Safe Superintelligence Inc.
What awards has Ilya Sutskever received?
Notable honours include Fellow of the Royal Society (2022).
References
- Ilya Sutskever — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Ilya Sutskever — IMDb. IMDb. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Ilya Sutskever (Q21712134) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
Includes material from the Wikipedia article “Ilya Sutskever”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more
External links
About this profile
- Researched by the TrackFame editorial team; reviewed by Sanjay Sokal under our editorial policy
- First published 4 November 2026
- Last updated
Cite this page
“Ilya Sutskever.” TrackFame, last updated 4 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/ilya-sutskever
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