Ilya Sutskever (Hebrew: איליה סוצקבר; born 1986 in Gorky, Soviet Union) is a Soviet-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist specializing in machine learning.^[58,55] He studied at the Open University of Israel and the University of Toronto, where he completed his BSc, MSc, and a 2013 PhD thesis titled "Training recurrent neural networks" supervised by Geoffrey Hinton, and his affiliations include the University of Toronto, Google Brain, and OpenAI.^[56]

Along with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-created the convolutional neural network AlexNet.^[2,57] He has made several major contributions to deep learning, including sequence-to-sequence learning, GPT models, reasoning models, and contributions to CLIP, DALL-E, and AlphaGo.^[59] Ranked among the most highly cited computer scientists in history, Sutskever won the NeurIPS Test of Time Award for three consecutive years (2022–2024) and received the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science in 2026.^[60]

As a co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, Sutskever oversaw the research breakthroughs that led to large language models, the launch of ChatGPT, and reasoning models like o1.^[2,74] In 2023, he participated as an OpenAI board member in ousting CEO Sam Altman, before Altman was reinstated a week later and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, which achieved a valuation of over $30 billion within a year.^{[62,63,61,64]}

Sutskever was born in 1986 into a Jewish family in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (then Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union).^[37] At the age of 5, he immigrated to Israel with his family and grew up in Jerusalem.^[67] Sutskever proved to be a good student in school, and in eighth grade started taking classes at the Open University of Israel.^[37,66] 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.^{[11,13,68,57,91]}

At the University of Toronto, Sutskever received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2005, a master's degree in computer science in 2007, and a PhD in computer science in 2013 under the supervision of his doctoral advisor, Geoffrey Hinton.^[16,14,56,8] In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky.^[2,17,9]

In 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University before returning to the University of Toronto to join Hinton's new research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton's research group. In 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain.^[69] At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm, and also worked on TensorFlow.^[71,20] He is also one of the AlphaGo paper's many co-authors.^[72,70]

At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.^[67,73] He is credited with establishing OpenAI’s scaling ethos and is considered to have played a key role in the development of ChatGPT, as well as later leading the research that led to reasoning models.^[76] In 2022, Sutskever tweeted, "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious", which triggered debates about AI consciousness.^[57] In 2023, he announced that he would co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which was trying to solve the alignment of superintelligences within four years, writing that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade.^[22,75]

Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the nonprofit entity that controlled OpenAI.^[23] In November 2023, the board fired Sam Altman, saying that "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board".^[24] After months of tension and dissatisfaction with Altman's leadership style, Sutskever authored a 52-page memo relying heavily on information from Mira Murati—accusing Altman of lying, manipulating executives, and fostering internal division—and submitted it to the board before ultimately joining them in voting for Altman's termination.^[77,78] In an all-hands company meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever said that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty", but the next week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ouster.^[79] Altman's firing and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman's resignation led three senior researchers to resign from OpenAI.^[80,49] After that, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board and was absent from OpenAI's office, with some sources suggesting he was leading the team remotely while others said he no longer had access to the team's work.^[33] In an October 2024 interview after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton expressed support for Sutskever's decision to fire Altman, emphasizing concerns about AI safety.^[2]

In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a new project that was "very personally meaningful" to him, following a turbulent period at the organization marked by leadership crises and internal debates about the direction of AI development and alignment 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.^[81,59]

In June 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a new company he founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.^[82] 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". In September 2024, the company announced that it had raised $1 billion from venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel.^[83] In March 2025, Safe Superintelligence Inc. raised $2 billion more and reportedly reached a $32 billion valuation, notably due to Sutskever's reputation.^[84] In June 2025, SSI rejected an offer from Meta Platforms to buy the company, and Sutskever became CEO of SSI shortly thereafter, after co-founder and CEO Gross left for Meta.^[86,87,85] In July 2026, Nvidia announced it would invest $5 billion into SSI.^[27,3] The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated Ilya Sutskever's net worth at $13.8 billion as of July 2026, largely stemming from the $7 billion OpenAI stake he verified on the stand during the 2026 Musk v. Altman trial alongside a $6.75 billion holding in Safe Superintelligence.

In 2015, Sutskever was named in MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35. In 2018, he was the keynote speaker at Nvidia Ntech 2018 and the AI Frontiers Conference 2018. In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).

In 2022, 2023, and 2024, he won the Neural Information Processing Systems' Test of Time award, which recognizes papers that significantly shaped the AI field over at least ten years. He was included in Time's list of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Toronto. In 2026, he received the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science, presented for the first time in artificial intelligence.