Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder · Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Co-founder of OpenAI and Safe Superintelligence Inc., one of the most cited researchers in deep learning.
Who Is Ilya Sutskever
Ilya Sutskever is one of the most influential deep learning researchers of his generation. A student of Geoffrey Hinton, he was a co-author of AlexNet — the 2012 model that ignited the deep learning revolution in computer vision — and later co-founded OpenAI, where he served as Chief Scientist.
What He Built
Sutskever’s research underpins much of modern AI: sequence-to-sequence learning, foundational work on neural machine translation, and the scaling-oriented research culture that produced the GPT series. At OpenAI he was the lead scientific voice behind the conviction that scaling up next-token prediction would yield broadly capable models.
Why He Matters
In 2024 Sutskever left OpenAI to found Safe Superintelligence Inc., a lab with a single declared product: a safe superintelligence, pursued without the commercial pressures of shipping intermediate products. His move underscored the deepening industry debate over how — and how cautiously — to approach systems more capable than humans.