1986–, Computer scientist
Ilya Sutskever is a Canadian-Israeli computer scientist who has been at the centre of nearly every major deep-learning breakthrough of the past fifteen years. As a co-author of AlexNet (with Krizhevsky and Hinton, 2012), he helped launch the modern era. With Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le he co-authored Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks (2014), introducing the encoder–decoder architecture for neural machine translation. He was a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015 and its Chief Scientist until May 2024.
As OpenAI's research lead Sutskever played a central role in the GPT line, from GPT-1 (2018) through ChatGPT (2022) and GPT-4 (2023), and was the senior scientific authority through the organisation's most consequential period. He was a key figure in the November 2023 OpenAI board crisis that briefly removed Sam Altman as CEO, and ultimately departed OpenAI in May 2024 to co-found Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. Sutskever became CEO of SSI in July 2025 after Daniel Gross left to join Meta; the company reportedly reached a valuation of roughly USD 32 billion in April 2025.
Sutskever's research interests have broadened to encompass the philosophical and safety dimensions of AGI; he has been a vocal advocate for AI safety research and has spoken publicly about the possibility of advanced AI exceeding human capabilities in the coming decade.
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Related people: Geoffrey Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky, Sam Altman
Works cited in this book:
- ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (2012) (with Alex Krizhevsky, Geoffrey E. Hinton)
- Intriguing properties of neural networks (2013) (with Christian Szegedy, Wojciech Zaremba, Joan Bruna, Dumitru Erhan, Ian Goodfellow, Rob Fergus)
- Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting (2014) (with Nitish Srivastava, Geoffrey E. Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky, Ruslan Salakhutdinov)
- Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks (2014) (with Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le)
- Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search (2016) (with David Silver, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Veda Panneershelvam, Marc Lanctot, Sander Dieleman, Dominik Grewe, John Nham, Nal Kalchbrenner, Timothy Lillicrap, Madeleine Leach, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Thore Graepel, Demis Hassabis)
- Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (2018) (with Alec Radford, Karthik Narasimhan, Tim Salimans)
- Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners (2019) (with Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei)
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020) (with Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Sandhini Agarwal, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Gretchen Krueger, Tom Henighan, Rewon Child, Aditya Ramesh, Daniel M. Ziegler, Jeffrey Wu, Clemens Winter, Christopher Hesse, Mark Chen, Eric Sigler, Mateusz Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, Christopher Berner, Sam McCandlish, Alec Radford, Dario Amodei)
- Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision (2021) (with Alec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh, Gabriel Goh, Sandhini Agarwal, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Pamela Mishkin, Jack Clark, Gretchen Krueger)
- Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision (2023) (with Collin Burns, Pavel Izmailov, Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Bowen Baker, Leo Gao, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Yining Chen, Adrien Ecoffet, Manas Joglekar, Jan Leike, Jeffrey Wu)
- Let's Verify Step by Step (2023) (with Hunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yura Burda, Harri Edwards, Bowen Baker, Teddy Lee, Jan Leike, John Schulman, Karl Cobbe)
- Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision (2023) (with Alec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Tao Xu, Greg Brockman, Christine McLeavey)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 1: What Is AI?, A Brief History of AI