Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever was born in 1986 in Nizhny Novgorod

Sutskever was born in 1986 in Nizhny Novgorod, then called Gorky, to a Russian-Jewish family. At 5 he immigrated to Israel with his family and grew up in Jerusalem. In eighth grade he began taking classes at the Open University of Israel.

At 16 he moved with his family to Canada and was admitted to the University of Toronto. There he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2005, a master's in computer science in 2007 and a PhD in 2013 under Geoffrey Hinton. In 2012 he built AlexNet with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky.

After a short postdoc at Stanford, he joined Hinton's company DNNResearch, which Google bought in 2013. At Google Brain he helped create sequence-to-sequence learning and worked on TensorFlow. At the end of 2015 he co-founded OpenAI and became its chief scientist.

In November 2023 he was among the OpenAI board members who removed Sam Altman as CEO. Altman returned a week later, and Sutskever left the board. He left OpenAI in May 2024.

In June 2024 he founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. He became its CEO in 2025 after Gross left.