Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence Inc.
About
Ilya Sutskever is a co-founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), focused on building safe superintelligent AI. Previously, he was co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI, where he led research behind the GPT series. A student of Geoffrey Hinton, he co-created AlexNet, revolutionizing computer vision. He departed OpenAI in 2024 to focus on AI safety.
Key Contributions
- Co-authored AlexNet (2012), the ImageNet breakthrough that made deep convolutional networks impossible to ignore
- Co-authored the 2014 sequence-to-sequence learning paper that became foundational for neural machine translation and early encoder-decoder models
- Contributed to major deep-learning systems beyond language, including work connected to CLIP, DALL·E, and AlphaGo
- Co-founded OpenAI and served as Chief Scientist, helping define the scaling-centered research culture behind the GPT era
- Co-led OpenAI's Superalignment effort before leaving to co-found Safe Superintelligence Inc. around a narrower safety-first mission
- Played a central role in the 2023 Altman board crisis and later reversed course, exposing unresolved tensions between AI safety governance and company control
