Ilya Sutskever (born 1986) is a prominent Israeli-Canadian computer scientist and researcher widely recognized for his foundational contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, particularly in deep learning and large language models. He is a co-founder and the chief executive officer of Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a research organization dedicated to the development of safe superintelligent AI systems. Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Soviet Union (now Russia), Sutskever emigrated with his family to Israel at the age of five. He spent his formative years in Jerusalem before moving to Canada at age 16. His academic journey took place at the University of Toronto, where he demonstrated early promise in mathematics and computer science. He earned a Bachelor of Science in mathematics in 2005, followed by a Master of Science in computer science in 2007. In 2013, he completed his PhD in computer science under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in neural networks and a Nobel laureate. Sutskever’s early career was marked by groundbreaking research that catalyzed the modern deep learning era. In 2012, while working in Hinton’s lab, he co-authored the influential paper on AlexNet with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton. This convolutional neural network significantly outperformed existing models in image recognition, serving as a primary catalyst for the subsequent surge of interest in deep learning. Following a brief postdoctoral tenure at Stanford University with Andrew Ng, Sutskever co-founded DNNResearch. Shortly after its founding, the company was acquired by Google in 2013, leading him to join the Google Brain team. During his tenure at Google, he worked on sequence-to-sequence learning—an algorithm that became central to machine translation and natural language processing—and contributed to the development of the TensorFlow framework and the AlphaGo project. In 2015, Sutskever co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit organization (which later restructured) aimed at ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. As the company's chief scientist, he played a leadership role in guiding research that led to the development of the GPT series of large language models. His work at OpenAI emphasized the scaling hypothesis—the idea that increasing computing power and data size would consistently improve model performance—and eventually shifted toward addressing the risks of superintelligent systems. In 2023, he was a key figure in the board’s temporary removal of CEO Sam Altman, a decision that sparked internal and external scrutiny regarding OpenAI’s governance and direction. Sutskever subsequently resigned from the OpenAI board and departed the company in May 2024. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) alongside Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. The company distinguishes itself through a singular, concentrated focus on the safety and development of superintelligence, operating outside the constraints of immediate commercial product cycles. Under his leadership, SSI has attracted significant capital and industry attention, positioning itself as a central player in the global pursuit of AGI alignment and safety. Throughout his career, Sutskever has received numerous accolades, including being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2022 and receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto in 2025. He is frequently cited as one of the most influential figures in the development of contemporary AI, noted for his technical acumen and his vocal advocacy for the safe, responsible development of powerful artificial intelligence.