Sutskever co-founded and was chief scientist atOpenAI.[11] In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board thatousted 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 companySafe Superintelligence alongsideDaniel Gross and Daniel Levy.[12][13]
At the University of Toronto, Sutskever received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2005,[19][20][4][21] a master's degree in computer science in 2007,[20][22] and a PhD in computer science in 2013.[2][23][24] His doctoral advisor was Geoffrey Hinton.[1]
In 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as apostdoc withAndrew Ng atStanford University. He then returned to the University of Toronto and joined Hinton's new research company DNNResearch, aspinoff of Hinton's research group. In 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist atGoogle Brain.[26]
At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organizationOpenAI.[30][31][32]
In 2022, Sutskever tweeted, "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious", which triggered debates aboutAI consciousness.[33][34] He is considered to have played a key role in the development ofChatGPT.[35][36] In 2023, he announced that he would co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which is trying to solve thealignment ofsuperintelligences within four years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade.[37]
Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI.[38] In November 2023, the boardfired Sam Altman, saying that "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board".[39] He authored a 52-page memo that relied heavily on information fromMira Murati, accusing Altman of lying, manipulating executives, and fostering internal division. Sutskever submitted the memo to the board after months of tension and dissatisfaction with Altman's leadership style, and ultimately led the board in voting for Altman's termination.[40][41] In an all-hands company meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever said that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty",[42] but the next week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ouster.[43] Altman's firing and OpenAI's co-founderGreg Brockman's resignation led three senior researchers to resign from OpenAI.[44] After that, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board[45] and was absent from OpenAI's office. Some sources suggested he was leading the team remotely, while others said he no longer had access to the team's work.[46]
In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a new project that was "very personally meaningful" to him. His decision followed a turbulent period at OpenAI marked by leadership crises and internal debates about the direction of AI development andalignment protocols.Jan Leike, the other leader of the superalignment project, announced his departure hours later, citing an erosion of safety and trust in OpenAI's leadership.[47]
In June 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc., a new company he founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy with offices inPalo Alto andTel Aviv.[48] In contrast to OpenAI, which releases revenue-generating products, Sutskever said the new company's "first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then".[13] In September 2024, the company announced that it had raised $1 billion from venture capital firms includingAndreessen Horowitz,Sequoia Capital,DST Global, andSV Angel.[49] In March 2025, Safe Superintelligence Inc. raised $2 billion more and reportedly reached a $32 billion valuation, notably due to Sutskever's reputation.[50][51]
In an October 2024 interview after winning theNobel Prize in Physics,Geoffrey Hinton expressed support for Sutskever's decision to fire Altman, emphasizing concerns about AI safety.[52][53]
^Sutskever, Ilya; Vinyals, Oriol; Le, Quoc V. (8 December 2014)."Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks".Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems - Volume 2. NIPS'14.2. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press:3104–3112.arXiv:1409.3215.
^Martín Abadi; Ashish Agarwal; Paul Barham; et al. (16 March 2016).TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems.arXiv:1603.04467.WikidataQ29040034.
^"Our structure".Archived from the original on 29 July 2023. Retrieved20 November 2023.OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, composed of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.
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